continents

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:53 PM +0000 2/22/02, Lynne Murphy wrote:
>An interesting dialectal variation in continentally-derived ethnonyms is
>the difference between "Asian" (referring to people and sometimes to
>cultural things, like cuisine) in the US and Britain (and South Africa).
>In the US, if we say someone's "Asian" we usu. mean 'East Asian' (Chinese,
>Japanese, Korean).  For people from India & Pakistan, we'd say "South
>Asian" or just "Indian/Pakistani/etc."  In the UK and South Africa, if one
>says that someone's "Asian" they mean 'South Asian'.  If they mean "East
>Asian" they're more likely to use a specific country name (in SA, it's
>often generic use of "Chinese") or "Oriental" or some such.
>
I'm not sure which of this is really determined by lexical meaning
(for a given speaker) and which by implicature or just preponderance
of contexts of use.  In the U.S. those from India and Pakistans, I
would claim, DO count as Asian, even though they may not the
individuals one would first think of when the ethnonym/geonym is
usually used.  Indeed, when universities break down their students by
racial/ethnic categories (or when all these college guides I've been
reading lately break them down), the "Asian" or "Asian-American"
category does include those from the subcontinent.  This doesn't
affect the point about which term is ordinarily used (and so doesn't
affect Lynne's observation as she actually expresses it), but it does
affect the question of what the labels really cover.  We don't
usually refer to dogs and cats as mammals either (especially in a
context like "She's out walking the mammal"), but that doesn't mean
they're not mammals.

larry