Comment by hombre_fatal
5 days ago
> that whole "Latinx" thing which seems to be nearly universally reviled outside of US
Well, there are a few things to clear up:
1. Latino is an American word that's only useful in the US to summarize people south of the US in Latam. People in Latam don't use the word since that grouping isn't otherwise useful to them.
2. There definitely are Spanish speakers who do use the -x or -@ suffix like "tod@s" and "todxs".
The mass confusion between these two facts is responsible for most of the discourse you'll read about latinx.
Americans don't understand that #2 exists. "Woke" Mexicans, for example, do use the -x suffix.
"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
>"Non-woke" Spanish speakers think the -x suffix is dumb in their own language. But they don't represent all Spanish speakers.
Active users of the suffix are a small minority: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2024/09/12/ho...
That article is on latinx specifically. As someone from and living in LatAm I can attest that use of todxs, tod@s, and even todes are not rare sights as replacements for "todas y todos". This is a distinct phenomenon from latinx.
>That article is on latinx specifically.
Later in the survey:
>Still, this population continues to favor the terms Hispanic and Latino over the newer terms Latinx and Latine. 52% prefer the term Hispanic to describe people who are of Hispanic or Latino origin or descent, while 29% prefer the term Latino. 2% say they prefer Latinx and 1% favor Latine.
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>As someone from and living in LatAm
This is about people living in the US.
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I totally get the use of a placeholder, but how do you _pronounce_ it? "Latinx" feels so weird because it's used not just in writing but in speech as well, even though it doesn't really make sense for Spanish phonologically.
Thanks for this, without someone saying this I would never have known. I didn't know the context at all, til!