How foreigners are referred to in some Asian languages
427 views · Published 18 August 2016 · 12:24 · Indexed 11 October 2026
Channel: Alex Liáng · 2016 · Education
Hi guys, I am busy revising my Spanish for my trip to Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic and Florida and have been wondering if the word Gringo is derogatory. After all, in Asian languages, there are different words to refer to foreigners and some of them are neutral, others are very rude. I have done my research and in this piece, I will talk about some of the most commonly used terms in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay and Bahasa Indonesia to refer to white people. Some of these terms are racist and others are not at all. And maybe I am stating the obvious here, I'm Eurasian (Chinese + European mix), I'm British and my spouse is as white as they come - so obviously I am not racist. I'm talking about the relationship between language and racism. After all, I grew up in Singapore, regularly hearing Chinese people use really derogatory terms to refer to white people - like, yeah neutral terms exist, but they always seemed to go for the derogatory ones. So can our language affect the way we perceive people from another culture, of a different skin colour? Actually I think it does - because it normalizes racism and that's why more enlightened cultures strive to be very PC when it comes to choosing the right terms to refer to people of a different skin colour or nationality. I could rant a lot more about just how painfully racist Chinese people are - because they have this ridiculous blind spot. They are always the first to accuse others of being racist towards them, but they are oblivious to the fact that Chinese people are hideously racist towards anyone non-Chinese. But I didn't want to make this video about that and chose to talk about the words from the various languages instead. I hope you guys will like this video.
