As a writer and communications specialist, something I’ve come to know by heart is this: language is never really neutral. The words we use to describe places, peoples, and regions carry histories, and most of those histories are, well, histories of conquest of course.

In Edward Said’s groundbreaking book Orientalism, he exposed one of colonialism’s most enduring legacies: the West’s hijacking of language and the habit of defining, categorizing, and naming the rest of the world on its own terms, then presenting those names as objective, universal truth. Today, decades later, many of those colonial labels are still in use; taught in schools, printed in textbooks, repeated in news broadcasts without a second thought.

In this post, we’ll discuss fourwo terms rooted in Western colonial perspective, and optional alternatives to use instead.

1. “The Middle East”

Perhaps the most familiar example, “the Middle East” was coined to describe the region around the Persian Gulf in terms of its strategic value to British imperial interests. 

But, middle of what exactly? East of where? The answer is: middle and east relative to Britain. For someone living in Cairo, Tehran, or Beirut, there’s nothing “middle” or particularly “eastern” about their home. It’s just home.

Said’s Orientalism calls out exactly this: the West plants itself at the center of the map and defines everything else in relation to that imaginary fixed point. The term “Middle East” isn’t neutral geography nor is it factual — it’s a geopolitical fiction that encodes imperial power into everyday speech. 

Alternative terms: West Asia, the Arab world, the Levant, or the Arabian Peninsula are all better options — depending on the specific region you’re referring to.

2. “The Far East”

For much of Western history, civilizations such as China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam were bundled under the label “the Far East.” Far from where? The answer, once again, is far from Europe. The term only makes geographic sense if you’re drawing your map with Britain at the center — which, not coincidentally, is exactly what colonial cartographers did.

They created the Mercator projection, the most widely used map in Western education for centuries. Yes, the map we’re all familiar with is itself a colonial document that inflates Europe and North America while relatively shrinking Africa and Asia in size. “The Far East” is just the verbal version of that same distortion. From Tokyo, London is the far west, isn’t it?

Alternative terms: East Asia or Southeast Asia for example, are terms that describe the region’s own internal geography rather than its distance from Europe.

3. “The Orient”

“The Orient” literally means “the East” in Latin — east, once again, of Europe. For centuries, it was used to group together radically different civilizations; from Morocco to Japan, under one imagined, homogenous, “exotic” category defined entirely by its difference from “the Occident,” as in, the West.

This is the heart of what Said was unpacking in Orientalism: it wasn’t just a word, it was a whole system. He speaks of Orientalism as the West’s way of documenting their findings from the East (through mediums such as writing, painting, governing or making policy) and portraying the people of the East as irrational, sensual, timeless and in need of Western civilization to rescue them from themselves… That is, by a more rational, modern, “civilized” West.

The “Orient” was never a real place, but rather, a projection — a screen onto which Europe cast its fantasies and fears to justify colonialism and domination. Indian classical music, Persian poetry, and Chinese philosophy all got filtered through this lens and reduced to “exotic backdrop.”

Alternative terms: Use the specific names of the regions or countries. The more precise, the better.

4. “Third World”

“Third world” was coined during the Cold War to describe countries aligned with neither the capitalist West nor the communist East. Pretty quickly, though, it became a term thrown around for countries that were regarded as poor, underdeveloped, and by implication, inferior. The ranking embedded in the language is colonial in spirit: it positions Western liberal democracies at the top of a civilizational ladder and everyone else somewhere below.

Frantz Fanon, writing in The Wretched of the Earth, understood that this kind of categorical thinking was inseparable from colonial ideology. Countries labeled “third world” were often poor not by accident or coincidental deficiency, but because centuries of extraction, slavery, and colonial rule had made them that way.

Alternative terms: The Global South is a widely accepted alternative, though still imperfect. Again, the best practice is simply to name the specific country or region you’re talking about.

Why this matters today

Questioning and unlearning these terms is not about policing language for its own sake. It’s about recognizing the formula: knowledge and power are tied together. 

When we keep describing the world through colonial categories, we keep reproducing colonial logic — even long after empires have formally ended. Every time we reach for more precise, more locally-grounded language, we’re making a small but real choice to see the world on its own terms rather than through someone else’s imperial lens.

— Ghina Fahs

(All photo credit goes to respective owners, sourced from search engines)