外人
外人(がいじん、[ɡai(d)ʑiɴ]; "outsider", "alien", "Non-Japanese")は外国人や非日本人に対して使われる日本語の語。この語は漢字2字、外(がい、「そと」)と人(じん、「ひと」)からなる。外国、外車といった語も同様に構成される。国籍、人種、民族などの日本で一般的な概念をまとめて指す。
その単語が否定的あるいは軽蔑的な意味を持つようになったと感じている人もいれば、中立、あるいは肯定的だと主張する人もいる。外国人(がいこくじん、[ɡaikokɯꜜ(d)ʑiɴ]; "foreign-country person")は、日本政府やメディアで広く使われている、より中立的でいくぶん正式な言葉である。
ISBN 978-0-521-53284-6 "Gaikokujin is uncontroversial and simply means a person who does not hold Japanese citizenship; it is the more common contracted version that has been the subject of irritated complaint: people may be pointed at by children and have the word gaijin either shouted or whispered though this is much less common in Japan today than it was thirty years ago. At a deeper level, though, it is the connotation of exclusion and oddity that irks, particularly when the term is combined with the adjective hen na to mean 'peculiar foreigner,' a term once often heard on Japanese television shows. The term gaijin itself is included these days by most broadcasters on their list of terms best avoided."
↑ Japan Statistics Bureau, accessed 8 December 2007 Archived December 25, 2007, at the Wayback Machine.