ABSTRACT
The great majority of Asian settlers in Britain corne from an area which before 1947 was called India. But that area today comprises the three states of Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, and obviously there-fore cannot be called by its old name. The Americans long ago adopted the sensible practice of calling it South Asia and I shall generally do the same. (I suppose that it is because South Asians form the largest group of immigrants from Asia which our contemporary colour -conscious society identifies as such that they are so frequently called just 'Asians'. But that is not a very logical usage, first because South Asia is only a part of that great continent, and secondly because other Asians from others parts of it (e.g. from Hong Kong) have also settled here in considerable numbers. Still, the current usage is probably too firmly established now to be changed.)
It is from three relatively small areas of South Asia, each separated from the others by hundreds of miles, that most of the settlers come. These are Panjab (of which there is both a Pakistani and an Indian part), Gujarat, and Bengal. (Bengal too has two partsIndian Bengal and Bangladesh.) They have as their mother tongues the languages known, correspondingly, as Panjabi, Gujarati, and Bengali. All three languages are closely related, and all belong to the same great language family as the languages of Europewhich, incidentally, makes them a good deal easier to learn than most British natives suppose. You will notice at once that Urdu and Hindi do not figure in this short list at all, and you will naturally want to know why in that case you are being invited to learn either or both of them. The short answer is, Because it is the language that most South Asian settlers expect you to learn, and because it is the one language understood by large numbers of people of all the language communities I have named. Why this is so needs explaining at some length.
