Asian
/ˈeɪʒən/ noun, adjective
Forms Asians
- noun (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) A person from or with ancestry in East or Southeast Asia, occasionally South Asia.
- noun (UK, South Africa, Kenya, Uganda) A person from or with ancestry in South Asia.
- noun A domestic cat of a breed similar to the Burmese.
- adjective Of, relating to or from Asia.
Synonyms
East Asian Oriental Oriental Asian Chinese Asiatic South Asian Desi Asian Indian East Indian Indian Pakistani
Etymology
From Latin āsiānus. By surface analysis, Asia + -an.
The modern North American and Australasian usage, referring to East and Southeast Asians collectively, seems to be a shortened form of "Asian American", a term whose origins activists and academics trace back to 1968 and University of California, Berkeley (UCLA) students Yuji Ichioka and Emma Gee, who, inspired by the Black Power Movement and the protests against the Vietnam War, founded the "Asian American Political Alliance" as a way to unite Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino American students on campus. It replaced the term "Mongoloid", but still continued the racial grouping of "Mongoloid".
The usage in Britain and some of its former colonies such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, stems from South Asians historically forming the bulk of immigrants from the continent of Asia to these places.
In the rest of the Anglosphere, the word "Asian" is sometimes, albeit less frequently, used to refer to South Asians and Central Asians, but rarely (if ever) to Near Easterners.
Webster’s 1913
Etymology [L. Asianus, Gr. Asia.]
Sources: Wiktionary · Webster’s 1913 — from the Wiktionary entry “Asian”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details