AP announces Stylebook changes, including rejection of 'Indian' as a shorthand for 'Native American'

The Associated Press has announced the latest round of changed to its Stylebook, the essential manual for those who write for publication. "This year, many of the changes centered on racial, ethnic, and gender entries, some new and some revised," writes Merrill Perlman, a member of the executive committee of ACES: The Society for Editing, formerly the American Copy Editors Society. AP makes its announcement at each annual ACES conference. (Mary Hufford, grammar guru at The New Yorker, has an entertaining report on the meeting.)

“Indian” is no longer allowed for references to Native Americans, "and should be reserved for people from South Asia or the nation of India," Perlman notes. "In another change, the stylebook now says that 'Latino is often the preferred noun or adjective' for people of Spanish heritage. 'Latina' is the feminine form. As for the gender-neutral 'Latinx,' the stylebook now says its use 'should be confined to quotations, names of organizations or descriptions of individuals who request it and should be accompanied by a short explanation.'"

AP will no longer use hyphens in expressions denoting dual heritage, such as “African-American,” a term in which many other organizations dropped the hyphen years ago. A hyphen is more meaningful than you might think. "Dropping a hyphen does not appear to be a big deal," Perlman writes, "but it reflects a growing acknowledgment among news organizations that racial and ethnic identities are individual, that the individuals have differing views on how to portray themselves, and that news organization should be aware of those desires."

Perlman says Asian Americans "have eschewed the hyphen for years, but the African American community has been less unified in whether to use it or not: the National Museum of African American History and Culture does not use the hyphen, for example, while some other institutions, including student organizations, still hyphenate. The trend in recent years, though, has been to remove the hyphen."