7 ms·

I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other

• comodore_ 5y ago
  > Just like we don't have Asianas and Asianos, and we can simply say Asians. south americans. your comment is the embodiment of the hola, my Latinx friends meme.
  • foldr 5y ago
    Most Latinos in the US are of Mexican origin. Mexico is not in South America.
    • trainsplanes 5y ago
      Then the term there is Latin Americans
      • foldr 5y ago
        There's nothing really wrong with "Latin Americans" (as far as I can see – I'm not Latino though) but it's just not a very concise or widely used term.
      • amanaplanacanal 5y ago
        If they are immigrants. Wouldn’t fit if they are just visiting.
  • yxhuvud 5y ago
    Cubans, Mexicans and many other are not South Americans.
• dfgpart 5y ago
  Would you say Gringx instead of Gringo? Or afficionadx instead of afficionado? Let the Latin language people decide and not delegate to white commissars.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    > Let the Latin language people decide and not delegate to white commissars. Latins (later known as Romans) were white, though. So their commissars would be white, too.
    • jefftk 5y ago
      > Latins (later known as Romans) were white It's more complicated than that: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iv-the-color-of-purple/ https://acoup.blog/2021/07/23/collections-the-queens-latin-o...
      • jhgb 5y ago
        It's more complicated than that when you get to later antiquity and vastly larger geographic scale, but I'm not quite sure how this matters for the early native tribes in Latium.
    • goatlover 5y ago
      I doubt they identified as a racial category invented centuries later. They probably thought of themselves as Romans, as opposed to Greeks, Persians, Egyptians or Jews. Skin color wasn't a deciding factor. Regionality and culture were what mattered.
• kace91 5y ago
  >I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender. Masculine plural is used as gender neutral for Spanish. Latinos already refers to both genders. Even fringe social groups that disagree with using the masculine for neutral terms (which are already a huge minority, since grammatical gender is everywhere in Spanish and it doesn't imply anything -a chair is female and a wall is make) Ignore the x. They would use the e for neutral (latine), an @ symbol in writing, or just use the long form (Latinos y Latinas). The x is an American invention that is unknown in the culture it tries to adapt and also not pronounceable in that language.
  • dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The x is an American invention that is unknown in the culture it tries to adapt It’s (both “Latinx” and the “-x” to reject the gender binary in Spanish more generally), AFAIK, a Hispanic LGBTQ culture invention, which while originating in the USA, is also used elsewhere (the “-x” ending as an emphatic rejection of the gender binary, not the specific term “Latinx”.) Though its a small minority that use it even in that community. Its adoption as a generic term for the Hispanic community by large institutions, though, is completely out of line with the community preference.
    • supakeen 5y ago
      We use 'e': latines, etc.
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        We who? -e and -@ are both used, sure, but similar studies snd survey to those showing that -x is rarely used in the community show those are even more rare.
        • kace91 5y ago
          Not sure about the culture of Americans with Hispanic heritage, but in actual Spanish countries, at least the ones I have experience with, @ is common (and a bit old), e is somewhat common and x is pretty much unheard of.
• lvxferre 5y ago
  >I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender. I see two issues in Spanish, one in English, and two in general. The only viable way to read this word in Spanish would be /latinks/, and it's against the language's phonotactics. So if you must replace the gender mark with something else, you'd need to use a vowel (cue to "Latines"). It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case. In English it sounds even more spurious. There's "Latin" already, why the hell are you adding a gender mark that doesn't exist in the language and then replacing it with yet another? While this, one of the general issues I see is that we Latin Americans don't really identify ourselves by this sort of catch-all label. We have a bunch of local identities - using an equivalent for "the other side", calling us "Latins" (with -o, -a, -x or whatever) is like talking about the ethnic Germanic culture of Canada, Suriname, Jamaica, USA and Belize, as if they had a lot to do with each other. The other issue I see is related to the above: who are the people using that word to identify themselves? Dunno about you, but I think they're just a bunch of Americans conflating heritage with identity. Every time I see someone claiming to be "latino" on the internet, I'm almost tempted to say "you are not one of us, stop lying" because of that. It's the same deal as the "Italians" from New York, or the "Irish" from who cares.
  • jhgb 5y ago
    > It is not necessary though, simply because grammatical gender is not social gender. There are a thousand ways to conceal the gender of someone in Spanish - refer to "la persona" (always feminine, no matter if you're referring to a man), plurify (the plural will take the masculine for mixed groups), so goes on. Or even, you know, use the default grammatical masculine, like the RAE recommends? Granted the RAE is a bunch of pedants but they're spot on in this case. I'm wondering, is it the case in Spanish as well that interrogative, negative, and indefinite personal pronouns are grammatically masculine? In those cases you have no other choice in Slavic languages, for example.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > I don’t really see the big issue with Latinx… Here’s the issue: English had the word “Latin” which was gender-nonspecific, and meant exactly what Latinx is used for. It fell out of favor, being replaced with Latino/Latina (used with the same gender rules as in Spanish) specifically because it respected the language and cultured of the people to whom the label was applied. Recently, some have adopted Latinx in place of Latino as the neutral in semantic gender form (specifically in the Hispanic LGBTQ community, it is one of several forms that small minorities have adopted in part to express identities which specifically reject the gender binary [others include latine and latin@.) While the various forms used for emphatic rejection of the binary do have some uses, the breadth of the use to which many major – mostly institutions have adopted Latinx as a general term for the Hispanic community outside of an LGBTQ context is unwarranted, especially given that it is (1) unnecessarily unpronounceable, (2) awkward in English and Spanish, and most importantly (3) almost entirely rejected by the target community, where the overwhelming majority of the tiny minority even aware of the term reject it, preferring Hispanic (mostly) or Latino (less preferred than Hispanic, but vastly preferred to Latinx) as the generic term, if one must be used.
  • umanwizard 5y ago
    Latin doesn’t quite mean the same thing as Latino. The former also includes people from Latin Europe; so, for example, a French person is “Latin” but not “Latino”.
• cout 5y ago
  In English, we often use the word Latin with no gender suffix (as in the term Latin Americans). As I understand, Latinx is not an attempt to be gender-neutral but gender-inclusive and language-inclusive (as Latin lacks the gender suffix used in Spanish and Portuguese, and Latino/a excludes French-speaking Haitians). Hispanic is also gender-neutral, and is probably what most people intend when they say Latin or Latino/a or Latinx. Hispano would be the Spanish word, but has never been a household word in the US. You can find some advocates of Hispanx, but I don't expect it to catch on. The biggest problem IMO with Latinx is how to pronounce it. The letter X is not pronounced the same in Spanish as it is in English.
  • umanwizard 5y ago
    > Latino/a excludes French-speaking Haitians The vast majority of Haitians don’t speak French, but if they did, why would “Latino” exclude them? French is a Latin-derived language as much as Spanish and Portuguese are, and “latino” is a substring of the word for “Latin American” in all three languages (Latinoaméricain, in the case of French).
    • cout 5y ago
      Correct, the majority speak Haitian Creole, though that is a language derived in part from French. I don't want to debate whether Creole-speaking and French-speaking Haitians should be considered Latin, only point out that many people do consider them Latin, since Hispanola is part of Latin America. French typically uses no suffix for masculine words and a -e suffix for feminine words. I am not a fluent French speaker, nor an expert in French etymology, but it is my understanding that Latino and Latina are words borrowed from Spanish (or arguably from American English), and are not originally French words themselves. Latinoaméricain(e) is also derived from Spanish (latinoamericano). I'm love learning new things about language, so feel free to teach me something new if I have misunderstood something.
      • umanwizard 5y ago
        Latinoaméricain is not derived from Spanish; it follows native French conventions for demonyms (e.g. New Zealanders are néozélandais). The term Latin America (Amérique latine) was in fact often used with the explicit intent of highlighting the cultural similarity between French people and Latin Americans. From Wikipedia: There is no universal agreement on the origin of the term Latin America. The concept and term came into being in the nineteenth century, following political independence of countries from Spain and Portugal. It was popularized in 1860s France during the reign of Napoleon III. The term Latin America was a part of its attempt to create a French empire in the Americas.[13] Research has shown that the idea that a part of the Americas has a linguistic and cultural affinity with the Romance cultures as a whole can be traced back to the 1830s, in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas was inhabited by people of a "Latin race", and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe", ultimately overlapping the Latin Church, in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe", "Anglo-Saxon America," and "Slavic Europe."[14]
• saberience 5y ago
  So this thread introduced me to the idea of "latinx" and now I wish I had never heard of it. What a ridiculous concept and a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.
• tzs 5y ago
  > I don't really see the big issue with Latinx... it seems to me an easy and correct way to refer to latinos and latinas, without saying both, or one or the other, or bringing in gender. The problem I see is that Latinos massively overwhelming don't use "Latinx" for themselves. 76% of adult Latinos say they have never even heard of the term "Latinx" [1]. 20% have heard of it but do not use it. Only 3% use it. Even among younger Latinos, 18-29, less than 50% have heard of it and only 7% use it. Among the minority of Latinos who are aware of the term only 10% say it is the preferred term. 50% say the preferred term is Hispanic and 31% say Latino is the preferred term. It seems pretty arrogant to call a group by a word that most people in the group don't even recognize and most that do recognize it do not consider it the correct word for them. [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...