FromLatināsiānus. Bysurface analysis,Asia +-an.
The modern North American and Australasian usage, referring toEast andSoutheast Asians collectively, seems to be a shortened form of "Asian American", a term whose origins activists and academics trace back to 1968 andUniversity of California, Berkeley (UCLA) studentsYuji Ichioka andEmma 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 uniteJapanese,Chinese, andFilipino American students on campus. It replaced the term "Mongoloid", but still continued the racial grouping of "Mongoloid".
The British, South African and Kenyan usage stems fromSouth Asians historically forming the bulk of immigrants from the continent of Asia to the United Kingdom, South Africa and Kenya.The word "Asian" is sometimes, albeit more rarely, used in the rest of the Anglosphere to refer toSouth Asians, but rarely (if ever) toNear Easterners andCentral Asians.
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Asian (pluralAsians)
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Asian (notcomparable)
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