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> So why don't people in those groups speak out against it? One example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx
by wearywanderer 5y ago
> So why don't people in those groups speak out against it?
One example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248/hispanic-latino-or-latinx-survey-says https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248...
3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it. Anecdotally, in Latin American countries, most people either mock it or have never heard of it.
But this doesn't stop anglophone woke activists from trying to impose this word on Latinos.
- alephu5 5y agoI'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this. On the other hand, right across the Hispanic world it's very common to use @ for gender neutrality: nosotr@s, latin@s, etc.
- kelnos 5y agoInteresting, how do you pronounce those words with the @ in them?
- pepelotas 5y agoIt's only for written communication. When speaking you either use the gender neutral(male) form, or a conjunction of both. e.g.: "latinos y latinas"
- KozmoNau7 5y agoThat's so much more elegant! What's the proper pronunciation for those words?
- umanwizard 5y ago> I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this. That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).
- CRConrad 5y agoThat's pretty genius IMO, given how the @ symbol looks a bit like both an 'a' and an 'o'.
- conradfr 5y agoI was surprised to see it used on the article itself.
- johnny22 5y agoI was so surprised at this Latinx controversy because I learned it from a Venezuelan refugee (to the US) about 8 years ago. I didn't hear it from some "woke" white person. It's wild that it turned into a big internet controversy.
- throwaway894345 5y agoThe statistics suggest your experience is atypical. It’s not that controversial IMO; it’s just a particularly egregious data point on the list of data points that suggest the woke don’t actually represent the groups they purport to speak for (which is the principal rationale behind their bid for social power), contrary to the impression we’re fed by the media. See also the statistics on black support for abolishing police.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- joshuamorton 5y agoThe statistics also suggest that anyone who uses the term, Hispanic or not, is atypical.
- ViViDboarder 5y agoIs this in any way surprising? In Latin countries, everyone is used to gendered nouns as that’s a core feature of the language. In Anglo cultures it is not.
- toyg 5y agoMost Latino people are also less "touchy feely" about these subjects. See for example the brouhaha around South American football players like Edison Cavani using words like "negrito" in affectionate terms. South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.
- walshemj 5y agoYour not seriously saying that Latin America does' not have racist attitudes and systemic racism? Maybe you should ask some of the indigenous peoples oh wait the colonizers pretty much wiped them out didn't they
- Bayart 5y agoLatin America isn't North America. There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish. And these people weren't wiped out in most cases. They mixed with the colonizers to varying degrees and are now those you call Latinos. The reason people from the older Hispano-American colonies often look *nothing* like Spaniards and Portuguese people is simply because they're partially or fully indigenous. North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Latin America isn't North America. A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa. > There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish. Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that. And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.
- jxramos 5y agoI remember when I first saw latinx, I thought it meant something about a Latin mixer or Latin cross exchange, or cross pollination. I had no idea it was a regex metacharacter for `a` or `o`, essentially latin[ao].
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoThank you for finally providing a definition.
- yosito 5y agoLatin[ao] sounds like Spanish slang for "latinized"... I could actually imagine this catching on more than latinx.
- remarkEon 5y agoThough I'm an American, I speak a little German and have friends who speak Spanish/French/Italian (either natively as they were born in a country that speaks those languages or they learned it). The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and it's non-pronounceable (or at least difficult to pronounce) in Romance languages.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI always pronounced it as Latinsk, which funny enough is the Danish word for Latin.
- amluto 5y agoAs a native speaker of American English, I find Latinx to be either unpronounceable or lacking in an obviously correct pronunciation. Is it La-tinks? Or Latin-exks? The natural English construction of an adjective derived from “latin” that lacks gender would he just “latin”, not “latinx”, as English doesn’t have gendered adjectives in the first place. (I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)
- mkd1964 5y agoI think it's just more political correctness gone wild. The vast majority of Spanish speakers in America are from Mexico but it somehow became derogatory to refer to them as "Mexican". How is that any different than calling somebody a Puerto Rican or a Brazilian? It simply denotes their place of origin.
- Bayart 5y ago>The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar. The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.
- waheoo 5y agoThe downvotes you got for this are hilarious. I guess they think you're off topic because they didn't read the article repeatedly referencing this offensive term that is basically like conflating Japanese and Korean as Chinese. > Many believe that the patriarchal nature of the Romantic language is not inclusive and can’t keep up with societal progress, These people are insane.
- saurik 5y agoThe large number of people I know who use that term, though, are [that word you will apparently be annoyed that I use ;P] and not white allies or something. Also: I feel like maybe you are mixing up Latino and Hispanic? Someone can be Latino/a and simultaneously Anglophonic. It doesn't surprise me that people who are Hispanic don't care as much or even find the construction annoying, as it doesn't work well in their language... but why, exactly, does that matter?