Comment by andybak
10 hours ago
Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
10 hours ago
Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"
Well, there are two things going on there:
1. "Asia" and "Asian" are different words, which mean different things.
2. There is a dialectal difference specific to "Asian" between England, where Pakistani immigrants are prominent, and the United States, where they aren't.
That might be a local thing, Hong Kong being a British colony means there's plenty of people in the UK for whom Asian means Chinese.
Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian.
The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.