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I'm Italian and I speak Spanish and Portuguese relatively fluently. Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it impos

• sidlls 5y ago
  Oh, absolutely. The appearance of "x" instead of the "a" or "o" is an immediate signal of someone who is trying to signal wokeness, but isn't actually.
  • doubleunplussed 5y ago
    Signalling wokeness is wokeness. It's not like there's some authentic wokeness - calling it wokeness is accusing it of being inauthentic.
    • sidlls 5y ago
      Okay; and that's fine by me, as I do consider it a rather shallow minded concept anyway. But it does mean something in certain communities, and there are indicators when someone is mouthing words without understanding their meaning or weight. To claim there isn't an "authentic wokeness" is not exactly correct.
• sz4kerto 5y ago
  Not even speaking about languages without gendered nouns. :) Sometimes I use she instead of he or the other way around, and the listeners likely don't realize that I have to pay extra attention using he/she when talking about people because my mother tongue doesn't even have a similar concept whatsoever. Anyway, we know that most of the time it's not about actually respecting the other person.
  • mastazi 5y ago
    I have a problem that is somehow similar to yours. In Italian, the grammatical gender of possessive pronouns works the other way around, e.g. if a boy has a girlfriend, in English you say "his girlfriend", "his" is masculine. But in Italian, possessive pronouns work the other way around ("la sua ragazza", where "sua" is feminine). To this day I still get it wrong sometimes e.g. if I'm tired at the end of a long day.
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    I have noticed this in some speakers (for example finns and chinese), and thought that this might be the cause. :)
• kaycebasques 5y ago
  I have studied Spanish and am currently studying Portuguese (my partner is Brazilian) and I think about this a lot. I would take the other side of the bet here. I would bet that this deeply ingrained gendering of objects does show up elsewhere and influence attitudes. Surely there have been studies on this? Of course I respect your experience as a native speaker and the fact that you know more native speakers than I do, but right now we're just battling anecdotes.
  • mastazi 5y ago
    There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine. What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the idea of masculinity or femininity might be de-emphasised in the mind of the native speaker, rather than reinforced.
    • marcus_holmes 5y ago
      I'm learning German at the moment. Everything is gendered. Such a strange way of looking at the world. And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness? [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M%C3%A4dchen https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M%C3%A4dchen
      • mastazi 5y ago
        Interesting I didn't know that. In Italian there is no neutral gender, Latin had it but in modern Italian it has been lost. > Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness? My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)
• 542458 5y ago
  I was wondering if it was just internet bias that made “latinx” look unpopular, but no - it’s pretty unpopular in real life as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx > Surveys of Hispanic and Latino Americans have found that most prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves, and that only 2 to 3 percent use Latinx.[1][2] A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. Latinos were not aware of the term Latinx; of those who were, 33% said it should be used to describe their racial or ethnic group, while 65% said it should not.[3][2] Honestly, with support that poor I’m not sure why you’d bother. (Aside, but iOS doesn’t even recognize latinx as a word)
• 0xy 5y ago
  3% of Hispanics use the term, and an overwhelming majority believe it should never be used to describe them. [1] Honestly it's disgusting it's still in use. When does it be come a slur given it's used against a population against their wishes? [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in-four-u-s-hispanics-have-heard-of-latinx-but-just-3-use-it/ https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...
  • reportingsjr 5y ago
    To play devil's advocate here (I don't personally care one way or another what hispanic people are typically called), I don't think polling sentiment is necessarily a good indicator of something's morality. For reference, 75% of polled people in the US disapproved of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the year he was assassinated. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-king-had-75-percent-disapproval-rating-year-he-died-180968664/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin... If we go by your logic of purely going off of polling, MLK, Jr. was an all around terrible man going against the wishes of the population. I don't think any reasonable person these days would agree with that.
    • 0xy 5y ago
      Are you implying it's okay to call a class of people a term which they explicitly do not want you to use against them? What sets this apart from a racial slur apart from a marginal difference in support?
    • marcinzm 5y ago
      This isn't about how everyone feels but about how the group that this is supposed to represent and name feels about it. It's like someone decided that your name is now Alice. You had no say in it and you don't like the name but you're now Alice. You had a name you called yourself but they didn't care and now you're Alice.
  • psychometry 5y ago
    Hispanic != Latino/a/x They're not describing the same population.
• kzrdude 5y ago
  It seems Latinx is a word used in some circles the U.S. and it's a word choice specific to their language. Much like how the U.S. use of plain "America" is contentious in the rest of Latin America - words have different meanings in different contexts and spheres, but there's is conflict when it leaks outside the boundaries.
• sergiomattei 5y ago
  Thank you for saying this. This has been my pet peeve for a while now. LatinX is not just appropriation, it's cultural imperialism at its finest. It's the "woke" American cultural hegemony trying to dictate what the Latino community can call itself. It's almost disrespectful to our autonomy, our culture and heritage. And I say this as someone who's completely pro the gender-neutral language revolution in his native tongue, Spanish. Latinos can call themselves whatever they want, we don't need the US to start telling us how we need to gender-neutralize our community.
  • emerged 5y ago
    The feeling you’ve described is how many Americans feel about the woke telling them how they can speak too.
• ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Imperialism has continued, but it’s just been rebranded as a pseudo-religious movement. There is only one Truth and any cultures that disagree are “behind” or “anti-progressive.”
  • FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    "BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER."
• rocqua 5y ago
  I don't think its cultural appropriation. It's not like people saying that are adapting features from latin people and adding it to their own culture. In fact, it is sort of the opposite. It is people forcing the latin culture into their own framework. Not sure how to term that, but not at all cultural appropriation.
  • mastazi 5y ago
    I think you are right, maybe the correct term would be "linguistic imperialism" because it forces something typical of the English language onto a Spanish word?
• skytreader 5y ago
  Learning German for the better part of the last two years, I agree with the thought of your comment. The only way I could wrap my head around the notorious German genders is by divorcing myself of the English concept that gender in language depends completely on the object referred to. Rather, I had to see gender as an arbitrary grammatical category; so just get used to it! However, I (an armchair linguist, I should note) am also a big adherent to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: your language affects your world view. And in terms of gender, there's at least research[1] that shows linguistic gender affects our perception of things. Of course, as with all research, it's open to critique, but I don't have the training for evaluating research in this field. Maybe someone else better equipped could chime in. Interesting quotes: > In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” ... This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. > Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. The second quote struck me in particular because when I first came across this, I just had a vacation in Paris where I visited the Pantheon. In one of the Pantheon's pillars is a depiction of Death (French: La Mort, feminine) and it struck me as very curious that in this depiction, Death is female. The only other work I knew of to do that was Neil Gaiman's Sandman. (This is already long enough, but going back to the topic of "Latinx" terms...I don't intend my point above as an endorsement of this practice. In fact I find them quite virtue signalling. I have more thoughts on this but I think the majority of gender (and racial) activism is distracted on bike shedding issues such as using this "x-form". But enough said for now.) [1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...
• matthewaveryusa 5y ago
  Ha, I always thought the ‘x’ was for eXtended, like the + in LBGTQ+. Anyways, yes all of my South American friends think it’s bullshit corporate speak.
• alisonatwork 5y ago
  "Latinx" is not cultural appropriation. On the contrary, it was coined by people of Latin American heritage who feel uncomfortable with the gender binary or who have an explicit non-binary gender identity. These people felt unrepresented by their own native language, so they tried to find a term they could use to describe themselves that would make them feel comfortable. There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on. And Spanish is far from the only language where this is happening - native speakers of many gendered languages who are non-binary have been trying to find ways to assert their identity in their own language. Personally, I don't use "Latinx" in normal, everyday conversation. "Latino" or (in English) "Latin American" works fine. But if I know I am speaking about a group of people where there are non-binary members who care about this, or if the topic is diversity/inclusion in particular, then I try to use Latinx. Why not? There's nothing appropriative about trying to use language that marginalized people have asked we use to better include them.
  • mastazi 5y ago
    > it was coined by people of Latin American heritage Were they predominantly people of Latin American heritage who lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or people of Latin American heritage whose primary language might have been English because they lived in a predominantly English speaking country? Let's say a person of Latin American heritage, but whose everyday language is English, modifies their Latin American language in ways that conform to the English language. How do we evaluate that? Yes, I agree that we could not call it appropriation, because that person is indeed of Latin American heritage, but is this not still a form of "cultural imperialism", where a language that is dominant for political or economical reasons imposes itself over other languages? And does it not become cultural appropriation later on, the moment that word spreads and becomes mainstream mostly among people of non Latin American heritage, while Latin Americans seldom use it to refer to themselves? > There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on. Yes, it is true that there have been some attempts at making the language more gender neutral in other languages too, as I said above I'm Italian and I saw some attempts in Italian as well, things like "Cara/o cliente..." ("Dear customer..." where "dear" has both the feminine and masculine termination, separated with a slash). And I don't have issue with those attempts. But I take issue specifically with this: why attempting to make the language more gender neutral, using a device (grammatically neutral words) that is typical of the English language and doesn't really exist in Spanish? I am of the opinion that you can use an inclusive language while still speaking Spanish, e.g. you could say "Latinos y Latinas", or for brevity you could write both terminations with a slash like in the Italian example above, there is no need to force an English language device onto Spanish.