Comment by dpark
18 hours ago
“Latinx” is weird because it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers deciding that poor downtrodden Latinas were being hurt by a word they never complained about and pushing this as the “appropriate” word. It’s so clearly not born of the Latino community because that’s not the construction they would use.
I remember reading about some similar thing with French and the French president’s wife responding that the language was beautiful the way it was and they don’t need outsiders telling them how to gender (or not) their words.
Gives vibes of saying “unhoused” instead of homeless.
I feel like the affluent just love to invent new words to show the “others” that aren’t using it how backwards they are, and how the affluent are truly enlightened.
I also thought unhoused was just a pointless euphemism, but I recently learned it does have a technical meaning. A "homeless" person might live with friends, in a shelter, or on the street. An unhoused person is one strictly living on the street/car/public space.
This is interesting. Two things can be true though. There may be a technical distinction between the two terms but I think many people (like me, until now!) don't know it, which means that many people do use it as a euphemism and not as its technical intention.
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If I had a friend who was staying with us because he had no other place to be, he wouldn't be homeless. That's like saying my 13 yr old is homeless because his name's not on the mortgage. The only point of the euphemisms is for people to feel self-righteous for policing language. Which they often do because it's lazier than any sort of real reform.
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The sillyness of LatinX is that there isn't even an "Ecks" sound in Spanish.
I can't help but read it as "la-tinks". And then I think of Tinkerbelle, who has the nickname Tink.
I assume you pronounce that X as the X in Mexico.
The X in Spanish is sometimes used to “neutralize” the gender of a word. An alternative is the @, as in “latin@“. Visually the x is more harmonic, because of its smaller size, and the fact that there are lower and uppercase versions.
That x is generally pronounced as an “e” in Spanish (i.e. “latine”, not “latin eks” or “latinks” and most certainly not “latinj”, as the j sound of x is only before a vowel, e.g. xavier = javier).
But why write an x and not an e? Because there are consonants that change their sound with an “e”. So, say, the word “chicos” (boys) and “chicas” (girls) would be written as “chiques” in neutral because the c sounds like an s and not like a k with an e in front… but “chiques” doesn’t look like “chicos”… visually it’s not recognizable… while “chicxs” is much easier to parse.
This is how it works. I don’t care to enter a discussion of whether this is nice or not, good or bad. I’ll just leave with the anecdote that I once participated in a project that involved a big survey written in the traditional “neutral” form, which consists of writing “chicos/as” to covers both binary genders. That form quickly becomes very hard to read… “Los chicos/as están sentados/as con sus nuevos/as compañeros/as”. Use of the x has a lot of pushback from some people, but all in all, it’s easier to adapt to.
that is even worse
I think the Latino community who cares about such things prefers "latine".
LatinX is awful. An AIM screen name from 1998.
Latini Latine tantum loqui deberent
I'm South African so wouldn't really know culturally how African Americans would see it, but wondered at the time if the changing of the Git default branch name to "main" was an initiative by European Americans worried about offending rather than actual offense taken by African Americans.
It is interesting how different locations find different things offensive. Only when I was living in Europe for a while (doing Blizzard Customer Service) did I became aware of how big a deal the usage of N word was, as over here the K-word (look up "South Africa k-word" if you don't know it) is the word of choice for the, unevolved, die hard racists.
Was similarly unaware, (but not really surprised in hindsight) how World War II references were much better left avoided and Nazi references an enormous no-no. Over here references to Nazism are very rare and while South Africans did fight and die for the Allies in Europe, the impact of WW2 over here was no where near what it was like for most of the rest of the world.
Most Latino/latinas I’ve discussed this with find Latinx offensive because there are strong (positive) gender associations with each, and it appears to be explicitly trying to erase them.
Classifying a Latina as a Latino or vice-versa will get you in a pretty serious fight in a lot of places.
Here in Spain both the 'x' and '@' versions are really common in written language. The 'e' version I've not seen. But they're not really spoken because the X and @ versions are weird to pronounce. Replacing the o and a with an e makes more sense but it hasn't really seemed to have reached here.
And no it's not just privileged white people. My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
It often leaks information the speaker didn’t intend to share. e.g., “I met a friend. She was late.”
Did the speaker mean or care to share to gender of this friend? Is it relevant? I don’t think so.
And I find it especially interesting when people argue for gender-neutral plurals, but then happily use gendered noun. It sort of feels like “everyone must stay in their lane” type of expectation.
Even the patriarchy argument is weird. The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context. Wanna stick it to patriarchy? Nix the gender from all languages!
> The patriarchy - along with religion - wanted this gender line and specification in every context
Did they? English used to be gendered but lost it ~1000 years ago.
Languages evolve in odd ways and don’t think the patriarchy or religion have much to do with it.
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I wonder how you would feel about, for example, Slavic languages. There, you leak information about the gender even about speaking about yourself in first person (at least in the ones I have some idea about). Example in Polish:
"Spotkałem kolegę" - "I [male] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałam kolegę" - "I [female] met a [male] friend."
"Spotkałem koleżankę" - "I [male] met a [female] friend."
"Spotkałam koleżankę" - "I [female] met a [female] friend."
Notice the different ending (em/am) depending on whether a male or female is speaking.
> My native language has no gender. Every time I see these conversations I wonder “why not do away with the gender?”
Yes, many languages have no gender or have a generic option besides genders.
I always find this very annoying in Roman languages, where every object has an arbitrary gender, and to make matters worse it's not always the same. A word that is female in Spanish could be male in Italian or Portuguese. It trips me up a lot and it's annoying because the gender is just some arbitrary thing there, it has no meaning because objects have no gender. If we're talking about people I can understand but things?
But languages are not very logical. They are something that melted together over centuries out of habit.
Persian doesn't have gender and Iran is famously not patriarchal at all.
It adds real world flavor, instead of mashing everyone and everything into the same grey goo of genderlessness.
It’s no surprise that the strongest (mainstream) gendered languages are also known as the ‘Romance languages’.
Is it logically simpler in some ways to not have it? Of course. Let’s not even talk about how complex gendered verb conjugations are in Spanish or Portuguese, for example.
But it does allow a lot of beautiful flourishes that add a lot of color.
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Interesting. Google trends shows that Latine is more common in Spain (and everywhere that isn’t the US).
Nonetheless I appreciate a perspective from someone who has an affiliation with the culture term refers to.
Ah I have to say I'm not reading much official media in Spanish, perhaps the media is taking up these terms faster. But I see x and @ in official event posters too.
But my friends and in the LGBT+ communities chat groups I only see people using the x and @.
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I’m curious on people’s opinions here cause I have seen this both ways. I have seen people say gender in the language at all is bad. And have said Spanish is sexist.
I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
Old English for “wife” was masculine. “Maiden” in German is neutral. In Italian, the formal “you” is the same as “she” (written capitalized).
Grammatical gender is not intrinsically sexist and doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you try to analyze it to tease out what patriarchs were thinking when they added these forms, because largely they never thought about it at all. The forms evolved over hundreds of years.
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> I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.
If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.
This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.
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>My Spanish teacher was a Colombiana and she always pointed out the innate patriarchal traits of the Spanish language while rolling her eyes.
Was the eye roll part of the sarcasm or...? Colombian and other related Spanish speaking cultures do the same things, so what's her point, to feel like she's sticking it to the invisible spanish dude?
No, she genuinely hated that even though it is part of Colombian culture too. But being part of a culture doesn't mean you 100% agree with everything.
I'm Dutch myself and I hate many things in Dutch culture. Especially those stemming from the calvinist influences. It's one of the reasons I don't live there anymore.
Which is funny because the entire Spanish-speaking world has always been deeply matriarchal.
No not really. In the Spanish language the masculine form always takes precedence.
And they are also catching up on feminism. Until recently here in Spain a woman would have to prove there had been violence when claiming rape. There was a big headline-making case where some rapists went free (well until supreme court appeal): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Manada_rape_case It led to the "only yes is yes" law which was already prevalent in other countries.
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> it seems to have arisen from a set of privileged English speakers
I'd recommend getting out a bit more or reading a bit more:
> According to Google Trends, it was first seen online in 2004,[7][21][22] and first appeared in academic literature around 2013 "in a Puerto Rican psychological periodical to challenge the gender binaries encoded in the Spanish language."[20][23] Contrarily, it has been claimed that usage of the term "started in online chat rooms and listservs in the 1990s" and that its first appearance in academic literature was in the Fall 2004 volume of the journal Feministas Unidas.[24][25] In the rest of the United States, it was first used in activist and LGBT circles as a way to expand on earlier attempts at gender-inclusive forms of the grammatically masculine Latino, such as Latino/a and Latin@.[21] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[10]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx
From the same wiki:
> Despite the increase in awareness, use of the term to describe oneself has not greatly increased over time.[4] As of 2018, use of the term Latinx was limited nearly exclusively to the United States.[29] Manuel Vargas writes that people from Latin America ordinarily would not think of themselves using the term unless they reside in the United States.[29]
Maybe it didn't technically originate in privileged English speakers but it certainly seems to have arisen in popularity among them.
As someone who lives in a 99% hispanic region in the US, I've never heard anyone use this term to identify themselves. We're right on the border and that sort of thing seems to mainly happen in larger cities north of here.
I’m not saying no one who identifies as Latino/Latina/Latinx has ever used the word, or even advocated for it. But the only people I’ve ever heard use this term are, bluntly, very white.
To the extent that the term has become widespread, it seems to have piggybacked on other diversity and inclusion efforts. People who identify as Latino/Latina seem overwhelmingly to dislike the term.
> Among Hispanic and Latino Americans, knowledge of the term is not widespread, and reception to the term as a potential classifier for the entire Hispanic/Latino population has been overwhelmingly negative. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly half of U.S. Hispanics were not aware of the term Latinx; of those aware of it, 75% said it should not be used to describe the Hispanic or Latino population, preferring instead the terms "Latino" and "Hispanic" by large margins.
Ironically, the also relatively uncommon “Latine” is in decline but still more popular than Latinx for all of recorded Google trends history. Except in the US. Of course.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=latinx,L...
LatinX to me reeks of white savior and HR speak.