Why don't Americans refer to Indians (and others from the subcontinent) as Asians?

I know there is a related question here, but I am not seeing an answer to "Why is there a difference?" Merely that an explanation of what is used in each country.

I am a speaker of American English, and I understand why the British refer to people from India as Asians. This is quite sensible given that the Indian subcontinent is located in Asia.

But, we in America use Asian only to refer to people from the Far East. (i.e. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, etc.) We completely exclude all people from Asia Minor, the Indian Subcontinent, etc.

And, I'm given to understand that the British and many other countries use Orientals to refer to the folks we refer to as Asian. In America, this term is only applied to inanimate objects, and is considered rather offensive to be applied to a person (since the rise of the PC movement in the late 1980s, in any case.)

Historically, Istanbul was considered the Orient (therefore the Orient Express). So, why is this term applied to people of the Far East, instead of the Near East?

Can anyone point out the reason for the divergence in terminology? Or is this yet another case of two nations separated by a common language?

Solution 1:

I suspect that the answer is that, for historical reasons, there are a large number of people of South Asian origin in the UK and many fewer of any other sort of Asian origin.

4.9% of the population in the 2011 census described their ethnicity as "Asian or Asian British" and chose the subcategory Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi, and a further 1.4% chose "Other Asian" (there is a separate category for Chinese, 0.7%). Many South Asians identify as Other Asian and not with any particular South Asian country (particularly common among Muslims who, or whose ancestors, immigrated from what is now India), so it's fair to conclude that ~5% of the UK population is South Asian and only 1-2% are any other sort of Asian.

The US race question in the 2010 census is different from the UK ethnic-origin question, but the overall Asian-American population is 4.8%. I could not find a breakdown, but Chinese and Filipino-origin Asian-Americans are the most established and largest communities.

"Asian" has come to be used to refer to the prototypical Asian in both countries - which is a South-Asian origin in Britain and an East Asian origin in the US.

British people, incidentally, are much less likely to use "Oriental" to refer to East Asians than we were in the 1980s, because we've absorbed the sense that it's offensive from American media. We might use it if fishing for a term - "East Asian" is not a category that comes to mind because it's not one that Brits deal with much, and the overwhelming majority in the UK are Chinese (ethnically; many Chinese in the UK immigrated from Chinese-minority communities in former British colonies in South-East Asia).

Solution 2:

I think I would be correct in saying that the usage of Asian to denote people of the sub-continent comes from the early 70's in the UK when many people of Indo-Pakistani origin living in East Africa were evicted from these recently independent ex-British colonies.

Pre 1948, we Brits would have referred to all from the sub-continent as "Indian", but post independence they became either Indian or Pakistani along geo-religious lines (later Bangladeshi became popular for people from what was known as East Pakistan).

So, back to the people of the "Indian" diaspora, whose families had moved from from one part of the British empire to another (India to Africa). In the late 60's and early 70's some of the new African nations started behaving rather badly towards people of "Indian" descent and either encouraged them to leave or evicted them from the countries that their families had lived in for generations. These acts of ethnic cleansing (as we later came to call it) led to many persons of "Indian" origin, who retained rights to British citizenship in the post-imperial world, turning up on British shores. Now, clearly, we could not refer to these people as "Indian"; they didn't come from India and many were from families that would have identified themselves as of Pakistani (or Bangladeshi) origin, so the term "East-African Asian" was adopted, mainly by journalists, anxious to find a term that didn't upset too many people (good manners, not PC). Almost by accident we seemed to have hit on a non-abusive term which could be applied to those whose genetics and culture originated in the sub-continent, and "Asian" came into common parlance.

Strangely, in the 80's in the UK, there was a move (by HR types as I recall) to substitute this term [Asian] with "sub-Continental". As we Brits use "Continental" as an euphemism for anything mainland-European and therefore odd, and "sub" has overtones of anything "less-than", this never really gained hold in British English.

I hope that this, coming as it does from an old guy who was there and watched this step in the development of our language, is helpful.