South Asian
Who is a South Asian?
A South Asian is a person whose ethnic roots originates from the South Asian countries of either Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldive Islands, Nepal, Pakistan or Sri Lanka.
What is the approximate number of South Asians? There are approximately 1.89 billion South Asians or about one-fourth of the world’s population, the majority of them below 35 years of age with the average in the 15-20 age bracket.
Map of South Asia
Which countries make up South Asia?
Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldive Islands, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
Why is the term South Asian used?
The term South Asian is adopted by the United Nations because it is inclusive and describes the people groups from South Asia. There is a common vocabulary to be used instead of Asian, Indians, East Indians, Indo-Canadians, American Indians, West Indians, North Indians, South Indians or other regional terms.
What is the South Asian Diaspora?
The word Diaspora
comes from the Greek word meaning scattering or dispersion.
The South Asian Diaspora are people of South Asian descent originating from
either Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldive Islands, Nepal, Pakistan or Sri Lanka
and living elsewhere now.
Globally, the South
Asian Diaspora number close to 30 million people as of
2020.
This number is
rapidly increasing as global migration of educated, skilled
and unskilled South Asians occur especially to the Middle East, North America, Europe,
Australia/New Zealand and other developed or developing countries. Other large
concentrations of the South Asian Diaspora are in South-East Asia, South Africa,
East Africa and South America.
Where is most of the South Asian Diaspora located?
The US is the South Asian diaspora top destination: in 2017, people of
Indian descent made up 1.3%
of the American population, and they are the most successful
immigrants in the country.
Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/09/india-has-the-world-s-biggest-diaspora-here-s-where-its-emigrants-live/
In the UK, South Asian minority
groups include Indians 1.45 million (2.3 per cent), Pakistanis 1.17 million
(1.9 per cent), Bangladeshis 451,500 (0.7 per cent) and other Asians. who
include Sri Lankans, as well as third-generation Asians, Asians of mixed parentage,
people from Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldive Islands and some from the Middle
East.
Source: https://minorityrights.org/minorities/south-asians/
As of 2016, 1,963,330 Canadians had South Asian
geographical origins, constituting 5.6% of the Canadian population and 32% of
Canada’s Asian Canadian population. This
makes them the largest visible minority group in Canada
comprising 25.6% of the visible minority population, followed by East Asian and Black Canadians
respectively.[3] The largest
communities from South Asia are found in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Metropolitan areas
with large communities from South Asia include Toronto (995,125), Vancouver (291,005), Calgary (122,515), Montréal (90,815) and Edmonton (91,595).[4]
Sixty-seven percent of South Asian Canadians in Canada live in Metro Vancouver and Greater Toronto as of 2016; together they make up nearly 30% of the combined populations of the cities.[5][6][7]