I’m curious as to how prevalient political correctness is outside of the United States. For example, if a black person lives in France, is he called an African-Frenchman? If someone from china lives in England, is he a Chinese-Englishman?
So is this a global thing, or do we Americans just have our collective panties in a bunch?
There are equivalent sociopolitical phenomena, but as with so many others, they do not always map exactly to the American understanding of the terms. For example, the implantation of gender-neutral language is pretty similar across many Western languages, but there is variance as to how much of a Big Deal is made of it, and to a large degree it depends on whether the language itself already “fits” gender-neutral references. OTOH in many Western European countries, it is perfectly natural to refer to “Africans” because, indeed, a majority of their “black” population will be recent immigrants from Africa or early-generation children of said immigrants. What I have NOT seen in writings and programming from other cultures is a large group of commentators whining about how awful all this PC-speak is – that seems to be where US-Americans seem to be more hung up on than everyone else when it comes to “inclusive language”.
What about the illegality of advocating Nazism in much of Europe: Ashtar, would you consider that to be political correctness?
Daniel
In the UK we do tend to mock some extreme political correctness such as ‘chalk board’ instead of ‘blackboard’, person-hole cover for manhole cover but use the reasonable ones such as Afro-Caribbean and Madame Chairperson (although this is falling from popularity with Madame Chairman seeming less prenetious). We don’t have as many ethnic divisions (or need to specify ?) as in the US, if someone is of Irish descent they’ll just say they’re Irish rather than Irish-English, same for the 2nd generation Latvians and Poles I was at school with.
Here in France the fact that the language has genders for inanimate objects tends to make people less rather than more sensitive about gender issues - of course un medecin (masc.) is a doctor becuase une medecine (fem) is a drug. It’s the same as asking why a table is femininne … who cares ? (French attitude)
Talking about ethnicity is a tangled web, large scale immigration is still relatively new. True the majority of ‘black’ people seen here in Paris are African but they are rarely referred to as Africans, to refer to them as ‘un noir’ is pejorative and unacceptable however you can say ‘un black’ (?!). For people of North African descent I can’t actually think of way of referring to them which isn’t overloaded with ‘meaning’ unless you specify a country maybe - so ‘un arabe’ or ‘un mahgreban’ (not sure of spelling) is almost an insult whereas ‘un algérian’ is ok I think. You’re French or you’re not (especially if you are BNreton!).
Outside the States & Australia the only places I’ve heard the dual ethnicity tags in use was in Estonia and Poland (in the 90s where younger people were ‘returning’ to their parents’ country and calling themselves) ‘Canadian-Estonian’ or ‘British-Polish’ - this was while talking in English tho so I don’t know if it was just a way of differentiating themselves from other expats or if they used the terms in their own language.
That’s Maintenance Hole, listed on plans as MH and sometimes abbreviated in speech to Ma’n’ Hole.
I have to disagree with that. Saying “un noir” is perfectly acceptable and commonplace. What you say is true only in a small subset of the population (young, leftists) who, accustomed from young age to hear the word “black” (that appeared quite recently in the vocabulary) came to assume that it was the PC word to use and that "noir"was somehow pejorative. “African” is sometimes used too (or “antillais”, when refering to a person coming from the french west indies)
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For people of North African descent I can’t actually think of way of referring to them which isn’t overloaded with ‘meaning’ unless you specify a country maybe - so ‘un arabe’ or ‘un mahgreban’ (not sure of spelling) is almost an insult whereas ‘un algérian’ is ok I think. You’re French or you’re not (especially if you are BNreton!).
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Yes, true…once again in the same young leftist, subset of the population…and more precisely the part of this subset who don’t personnally know many arab people, or else, they would know how commonly it is used by the arabs themselves. These people are creating their own vocabulary, and assuming that their internal PC speech is the norm, and that not using it is somehow tacky. These words are “overloaded with meaning” only if you assume they are.
“Maghrebin”, “algerien”, “nord-africain” are also used in the medias. Not only it’s more “PC” but it’s also more accurate (a large part of the “arab” population in France is actually not arab, but berber).
I would mention too that there are actually an issue with the the gender of job’s and title’s name. The norm used to be "Madame LE (masculine) proviseur (masculine), for instance. the opinions are highly variable even amongst the women. It seems though that "Madame LA (feminine) proviseure (made up feminine, the logical form “proviseuse” sounding bad, there’s a whole sub-issue related to the form and spelling of these newly created feminine nouns) is eventually going to prevail, these forms being more and more commonly used.
There are a few topics you’re not supposed to mention (or at least be very careful about what you say) in Japan. Yakuza, burakumin and the imperial family are pretty much it.
Racially, you’ve got Japanese, and you’ve got gaijin (foreign-person) or gaikokujin (foreign-country-person) and that’s about it as far as racial consciousness goes. All subsets of ‘gaijin’ are secondary political, religious or culinary distinctions. Most of what’s said is said without the slightest bad intent, so you learn to just laugh about it and warn people of possible trouble they could get themselves in if they’re planning to go overseas.
One odd point, however, is ‘kokujin’ (black-person). I’ve encountered a number of people (not very bright people, granted, but still more numerous than I would have expected) who consider “kokujin” to be a nationality of its own on the same level as “Amerikajin,” “Kanadajin” and “Kankokujin (Korean)”. I’ll never forget the surreal experience of trying to explain to a secretary that a person (an athlete in a newspaper photo, in this case) could be both “black” and “American” at the same time. Apparently, in her mind, one was only allowed a single classifying adjective at a time, and his was “Black.”
Well round here (I’m in the Midlands, UK), we pretty much just tell it like it is. If you’re Chinese, you’re Chinese. If you’re French, well, then you’re French.
If you’re black, there might be a little bit of controversy over whether your African or Caribbean (generally a discussion I’ve only ever heard black people have with each other), but when it comes down to it, you’re just black.
Probably the biggest issue we have is when referring to people of mixed race. A lot of people have a problem with the term ‘half-caste’, others don’t like using the phrase ‘coloured’. Some folk insist on referring to mixed-race people as black, when, quite clearly, they aren’t. Being mixed-race myself, and having used the phrase ‘mixed-race’ at least three times in this paragraph, guess which phrase is generally most accepted? 
I’ve actually always wondered how Americans go about this, do you same phrases? What is the most popular term there?
Oh, and if you want to get a little more in-depth - generally, mixed-race means one of your parents is black. If you’re mother is white, and your dads black - you’re mixed race. If your father is Indian and your mother is African, you’re mixed race. If your dads white, and your mum is Indian - you’re mixed heritage (or, more likely, just Indian). I don’t know if this is just standard where I live, or whether it is to do with PC-language, but I know a few Asian/white families who would go mad if you called them mixed-race.
And yeah, we did have a little issue a couple of years back with political correctness gone mad - the Madame Chairperson, person-hole-cover stuff - but generally, we’re more relaxed about it now. Sure, some people use it to their advantage - see black footballers playing the racial discrimination card for more info - but I think it’s settled down a lot now.
We use ‘Medelander’
It’s a play on words. Nederlander [= a Dutchman or woman] & Mede [= also, or fellow]
So: FellowDutch.
But if I heard the politicians right, the new word would be the one you, Americans use. So: SurinamDutch, MoroccanDutch, TurkishDutch, etc.
Got to get used to that. Somehow I found ‘Medelander’ much more friendly.
Here in Israel, the old term “Kushi” has been falling into disuse, and rightfully so - it’s equivalent to “negro” or “colored”. It’s beeing replaced by “Shachor” (black) or “Afrikai” (“Afro-Amerikai” in referrence to American blacks). However, Ethiopian Jews are never referred to as anything other than “Etyopim”, unless the speaker intends to be insulting.
Beyond that:
All Arabs are called Arabs, but Arab-Israelis are not called Palestinians (unless they insist which, is a whole other can of worms), nor vice versa. Druze are never referred to as Arabs.
Jews can be referred to by their background without a hyphen. Thus, Russian Jews are simply called “Russim”, and Morrocan Jews are called “Morroca’im.” This applies to all Jewish groups except for German Jews, who are never, ever referred to as “Germanim” - the popular term is either “Yekke” or “Yotzei Germania” (formerly of Germany).
As there are very few non-Jews in the country that come from places that contain a large Jewish community,and vice versa, there is little room for misunderstanding. Therefore, for instance, a “Greek” refers to Greek Jews, while a “Phillipino” refers to non-Jews from the Phillipines, of which there are many in Israel.
In Norway, the main issue is what to call children born in Norway to immigrant parents. The first sizeable generation of these kids are grown up now and starting to have kids of their own, so you’d think someone would have gotten around to inventing a term for them already, but noooo 
Anyway, a popular term is “annen generasjons invandrere”, which means “second generation immigrants”. However, a large number of smart***es, such as myself, have pointed out that a person living in the country of his or her birth cannot possibly be an immigrant, “second generation” or otherwise. An alternate term that has been proposed is “våre nye landsmenn”, our new countrymen, which is just so precious I can hardly type it without flinching. Really, I only rarely hear it used by non-politicians, and then almost always sarcastically.
Another problem is what to call a black person. “Svarting”, which could be translated as “blackie”, is pretty clearly a pejorative. The word “neger” is also used, but many people, especially those fluent in English, find it uncomfortably close to the English insult “nigger” (although it doesn’t derive from it) and prefer to avoid it, if nothing else to avoid misunderstanding. Personally I’ll use “afrikaner” if I need a term, or if I know which country the person is from, say that: “ghaneser”, for example. It can be a bit tricky with, for instance, black Americans, but I’ve managed so far. Mostly it makes me aware of when a person’s race is important (to help narrow down “that guy over there”, for instance) and when it isn’t (anything sandwiched between “my” and “friend” can usually be dropped or at least rephrased).
And after typing all that, I would like to thank Norway’s second-largest ethnic group for stating what they would like to be called, clearly, unambiguously, and by a clear majority. Makes life a heck of a lot easier for the rest of us 
One of my favourite linguistic subjects is gender-neutral language. Quebec is at the vanguard among this in the Francophonie.
The interesting thing (to me) is that the approach is the complete opposite of that in English: because every noun has to be either masculine or feminine. Therefore, they don’t try to eliminate needless references to gender (like English) by somehow making everything neuter (e.g. we say “we are looking for a new chairperson” to indicate that the person could be either male or female), as this would be impossible.
Instead, they make sure that everything is available in both genders. The older usage, for example, is that the great majority of job titles are masculine nouns: le docteur, le juge, l’avocat, etc. So a woman doing those jobs would be le docteur Curie or even madame le juge. (Worse still, sometimes the feminine form meant the wife of the dignitary: l’ambassadrice was the ambassador’s wife, not a female ambassador.)
Now, feminine forms are used for nearly all job titles: la docteure Curie, la députée Nicole Loiselle, la première ministre Kim Campbell, ma fille est avocate, ma mère est une savante médecin. This is essentially standard, as it is used by all levels of government in Canada. (Also, the “wife” forms are entirely switched over to meaning a woman in the job: la mairesse is the mayor, not the mayor’s wife.)
Also, most want ads and so forth include both forms: Poste disponible : directeur/directrice de ventes; préposé-e au service à la clientèle. Much use is made of words such as “personne” or “des gens” (although these nouns are gendered, they are interpreted as being necessarily gender-neutral, semantically): le/la candidat/e retenu/e sera une personne travailleuse et compétente; nous embauchons des gens enthousiastes et intelligents.
There have been a few cases in which a masculine form was needed: it’s now L’ordre des infirmiers et infirmières du Québec. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet decided whether a male midwife would be un sage-homme or un homme sage-femme.
In other usages, it’s becoming increasingly frequent (especially in hortatory language) to use doublets to include both genders: les Québécoises et les Québécois, citoyens et citoyennes, toutes et tous.
This is more or less accepted by most people, and I think even the people who don’t yet do this in their writing have gotten used to hearing it. It still isn’t as common in France as it is here, however.
China had all kinds of terms for foreigners, and there was a kind of a PC type of movement among the more educated classes, when I was there, anyway.
Most common people in China would call a foreigner – especially a white one – laowai, which literally means “venerable outsider,” but is generally considered to be quite demeaning and anachronistic. It has a connotation that would be roughly equivalent to “negro,” except that 95% of Chinese use the term regularly.
On the other end of the scale, there is yangren, which translated means something along the lines of “overseas person,” and is considered by many of the more educated elites to be much more polite. And very, very few Chinese ever use the term.
Ah clairobscur we always seem to disagree don’t we
Just so people don’t you don’t think my social circle is limited to young leftsists, I live in one of the more ‘mixed’ areas of Paris and my comments were based on my experience with friends and colleagues including a lady of about 30 who came over from Zaire when she was 8 - I actually had a conversation with her about this one day, she hates being called ‘noire’ but happily uses ‘black’ herself; someone who works at one of the aiprorts and where such issues have become more important since Sept. 11th; a berber lady who thinks that the ‘noirs’ should be sent home as ‘there are some places you wouldn’t beleive you are still in France’; another colleague is very opinionated, not too far away from Le Pen in some areas so I assume the language he uses is more likely to have pejorative overtones.
A question though, doesn’t the use of PC language always start with the younger part of the population ? An ‘afro-caribbean’ acquaintance from London is annoyed because her Jamaican dad still refers to himself as ‘coloured’ she on the other hand preferes ‘black’ - is her preference invalid because she is younger and more left wing than her father ?
Yllaria - really ? Maintenance Hole ? Thank you for fighting my ignorance 
Captain Roscoe would the ‘Asian/white’ families you refer to be happy being called ‘Anglo-Indian’ or does that reek of the British Raj too much ?
The most prominent (and the most awkward) PC issue in German speech is gender-neutral references to professions and other groups of people. The problem is that like in French but unlike in English you cannot evade grammatical gender:
“a doctor” or “the doctor” may be male or female. Same for “a teacher” or “the teacher”.
“ein Arzt” or “der Arzt” (1) is grammatically male. Same for “ein Lehrer” or “der Lehrer”
“eine Ärztin” or “die Ärztin” is grammatically female. Same for “eine Lehrerin” or “die Lehrerin”.
No problem when a particular person is concerned - you just use the correct gender. The problem is when people are referred to in the abstract or in a mixed-gender group. In the Bad Old Days (pre-feminism) it was assumed that the grammatically male term could also serve as a generic (non-gender-specific) term at least where a person’s gender was not relevant: “Our federal state employs 60,000 teachers” = “Unser Bundesland beschäftigt 60.000 Lehrer”.
After the advent of gender-sensitive language this is no longer the case - in the above example some people are likely to snidely: “So, our federal state employs 60,000 male teachers - and how many female ones?”
So, in order not to offend, in abstract references male and female forms are both used: “Unser Bundesland beschäftigt 60.000 Lehrerinnen und Lehrer”.
That’s a bit unwieldy especially when several abstract references are concerned - a ficticious example:
“Guidelines for teachers in alerting general practicioners to health problems of students”
“Richtlinien für Lehrerinnen und Lehrer betreffend der Benachrichtigung von Hausärztinnen und Hausärzten bei Gesundheitsproblemen von Schülerinnen und Schülern.”
In the progressive/alternative scene a usage to avoid this linguistic awkwardness is the use of internal capitalization: LehrerInnen as a contraction for Lehrerinnen und Lehrer. That has not caught on in general usage, mainly I think because you have to pronounce LehrerInnen (teachers of either gender) either homophonous with Lehrerinnen (female teachers) or use a small squeak to emphasize the capital “I”.
Curiously enough in negative references to groups nobody demands that male and female forms are used, e.g. you don’t read of “Terroristinnen und Terroristen”.
There are also some PC issues in referring to ethnic minorities. An ethnic Turk is referred to either as a “German of Turkish ancestry” or a “Turkish citizen” - but what if you don’t know about his citizenship? Using ethnic descriptions as a means of describing the look of an unknown suspect is a minefield. Recently a police department described a group of suspects they were looking for as “members of a mobile ethnic minority”. When someone murders a female relative the police are at pains, if this is the case, to mention the suspect’s German ethnicity (the full names of crime victims and of suspects/defendants are not reported in the German media, out of privacy considerations).
(1) We refer to Ärzte (physicians) rather than Doktoren (holders of a doctorate) because most doctors of theology or economics aren’t much use for purposes of medical treatment.
Hmm, I don’t know about this ‘Anglo-Indian’ thing - it’s not a term I’ve ever heard actually being used, so I don’t know if they would be happy with that. My guess is though, that if I used the term most people would just look at me like I was a nutter. Most people don’t use the whole Anglo-, Sino-, etc thing, as far as I know. If the question of heritage/race ever comes up, people usually describe themselves in terms of their parentage (is that the right use of the word?). Likw you said before Cat we just don’t really have that many ethnic divisions.
Example: (imaginary conversation between me and a new acquaintance)
NA: So, um…like, what are you then?
CR: raises eyebrows Excuse me?
NA: I mean, um…well, obviously one of your parents is black…or something, so I just, um, wondered…
CR: Oh! Well, my mum’s white, English born and bred, and my dad’s Jamaican. Well, he was born in England too, but his parents are Jamaican. How about you?
Some folk have a problem questioning people about issues such as this, and this is truly how people talk! I live in a town that has a quickly expanding population, with more and more immigrants from Eastern Europe and Africa especially, and the phrase, ‘So what are you then?’ is heard every single day. Talking about it like this means everyone understands each other. I mean, what would I be? Anglo-Caribbean? Most people would not know what that meant.
No, not really. Yllaria, please tell me you were joking… “ma’n’hole” indeed. They’re called manholes because men go down them. End of story.
There’s also “hafu”, though {Japlish for “half”}, if a child is half-Japanese. That one really pissed me off, I suppose because of the English connotations of half-caste or half-breed, but also because it’s applied as a noun with no further qualification - where we’d probably use an non-pejorative adjective, {“He’s half Japanese”}, “hafu” isn’t exactly an insult, but it’s pretty negatively loaded - “He is a hafu” means “He’s not pure Japanese”. Did I mention my son was half Japanese?
Hmm, lessee. Membership in a ‘club’ well known for war atrocities and a universal hate of all that’s not whitebred…
Label it any way you’d like and I’d expect we’d be against it based on it’s actions…That’s not being PC, that’s actively preventing history from repeating.
I’ve noticed the same usage as Captain Roscoe in the UK, ie “tell it like it is”. Generally speaking a black person is referred to as black. An Indian person as Indian etc. That’s not to say there aren’t people who use derogatory terms, of course.
As far back as I’ve been able to trace it, my family is entirely British, so I don’t speak from personal experience, but it seems that most people born in the UK call themselves British. It’s on their birth certificate, after all. There are a lot of different races in the UK, often second or third generation.
If I were to ask a black person where they’re from, I’m expecting an answer like “London” or “Newcastle” or “a small village near Plymouth”. I’m not asking because they’re black either - I’d ask a white person the same question.
I remember when I was at school, about 10 years ago, the maths textbooks used asian names for all of the questions where it was necessary - “Sanjay has 10 apples and Rashid has 3”. They never used names like John or Mary, or anything European or African. It was odd, and I never found out why they did it either. Not sure if they still do.
The gender PC-stuff seems to have died down too… I just see that people seem to randomly select male or female pronouns if it is necessary to describe a person whose gender is unassigned.