https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/06/hispanic-voters-latinx-term-523776
As left wing governments and corporations seek to reach out to Latin Americans in a more gender-neutral way, they’ve increasingly begun using the word Latinx, a term that first began to get serious use among United States academics and activists following the 2016 election of Donald Trump, but according to a new multinational poll of Latin American people, Latinx has unintentionally became one of the most homophobic slurs in Spanish and Portuguese. The incessant use of Latinx in advertising and government documents has only made the word more popular as a slur in only a few years. No Latin Americans polled referred to themselves as Latinx, the vast majority called themselves Hispanic or Latino even among the LGBT. What's most shocking is Latinx ranked first on the list of most offensive words according to Latin American people, most respondents said they wouldn't support a politician or organization that uses the term however there's monetary incentives for businesses and politicians to use Latinx, many Latin American governments are trying to phase out the use of gendered language and are offering tax deductions for the use of Latinx.
Trying out different variations on gender neutral language is good and how we eventually find one that sticks
The gender is literally built into the word. This is like saying "man" should be gender neutral lol
Latino and man are both gender neutral in the right contexts. Mankind for example.
And in plurals specifically (say, when you are talking about a large group of people, like maybe a cultural identity) "-os" is the gender neutral Spanish form. Everything has a gender in Spanish anyway, it's just a linguistic rule.
If you want that to change, you do it within the overall structure of a language. Like in English we've started avoiding ending professions with "-man", so fireman for example becomes fire fighter. Throwing an x at the end of the word just doesn't work for Spanish and is hard to pronounce. Again if you must, latine is clearly the better term, there's nothing to "try out".
I'm curious, are you a native spanish speaker or from a latine background?
I agree that Latine is preferable and also I support any attempt to develop further gender neutral language.
Latinx originally showing up, particularly when written makes complete sense when aiming for shorthand and works well in North America where a lot of folx in the Latin community are bilingual. It's also inclusive of people with nonbinary gender identies.
Not really, I'm half Portuguese (as in, my mother is from Portugal). But I mainly just look at it from an autistic standpoint of - that's just not how the language works. It would be the same in Portuguese.
Again, latine covers all than better and is actually pronounceable.
Why? "Folks" is literally never a gendered word. It's basically the same as latine vs latinx, a perfectly sensible genderless word vs "just throw an x in it". There's no good reason for it.
I agree with you about folx, but I'd say Latinx/Latine is far more sensible relatively since there is a legitimate gender association there
Yeah, like I said "folx" is really just icing when you feel like using it or if someone requests you do.
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Language works however humans agree to use it. All of grammar is essentially guidelines and it develops over time. Language is literally never perfect and that's why it's cool.
Agreed, but I'm not going to let perfect get in the way of good. Both can coexist.
It's an innocuous way to signal purposeful inclusion of trans and non-binary genders. It's a flourish on top of the word. I'm never going to be pissed if someone uses "folks" instead, but I like to use it when I think to.
The queer community has a long history of language hacking. When society attempts to systemically erase you, then every aspect of it becomes fair game for remixing.
Yes, but it also falls into patterns that help keep things consistent and understandable. And again, pronounceable. "Latinx" is not really possible in Spanish pronunciation. At best it would be "latin-equis" which is awkward. And the pronunciation "latin-eks" is just not Spanish at all, it's English through and through.
They don't need to. There's no good reason for "latinx" to exist.
That implies "folks" excludes them, which it doesn't. It seems weird to say their inclusion necessitates a new word as if they're too different to be included in the existing word, which they aren't. At least it's pronounced the same, but still.
Sure it is. X can sometimes make the same sound as it does in english although it's uncommon. Regardless, it's most common in North America and I can understand why latine might be easier in other regions.
That is not something anyone who is not a spanish speaker really gets to decide. It's used primarily in north america and that's fine. Puerto Rico also has hermanx and niñx in use, particularly within the queer community.
LGBTQ+ people utilize it and also it literally hurts no one to use it.
No it does not imply that. I literally said in my comment that it doesn't.
"Man" is gender neutral in many respects. The word can be used to mean "human." As a suffix it almost exclusively means "human who does x." Like fireman.
Try calling a trans woman or a nonbinary person a man and see how gender neutral they think it is.
The word can sometimes refer to humans in general, but it's almost always a holdover from when men were viewed as default.
"Man" was originally gender neutral in English, with the word "wer" used for males instead (which survives today in the word "werewolf").
That's a fun fact, isn't that left over from middle or old English? I'm talking about relatively modern English, say 1700's onward.
Example "all men are created equal" was absolutely not inclusive of women.
It's closer to Old English, but it's why the genderless usage still exists.
Latin actually had the same. "Vir" for male which came from the same root as English "wer" (see also: "virile" which came from Latin through French rather than Germanic through Old English). The same thing happened where the genderless word ("homō") became the male word, "hombre" in Spanish or "homem" in Portuguese.
The thing is that those most affected by the usage of gendered language, do not view man as genderless. It's a completely valid viewpoint to have and language is meant to change.
I love how our good old Germanic tongue makes it so you can NEVER make a definitive statement about grammar. Even without the bs rules, so much of what we assume are root words are unrelated. Reading that made me wonder if it was the root of Norman, and yep comes from Northman or Northern Peoples. From what I can tell in Old English it was most commonly used like we use "you"
Also apparently Wif, the counterpart to Wer, was also gender neutral.
So if I am correct, wif and man both are neutral, and form a feminine word for a female person when put together Wifmann
I could be off base, and this is aside from the point, but I look up a language thing and my brain didn't melt for once so I am kinda proud
That's super interesting! Does "wife" trace its etymology back to that by any chance?
I seriously love how fluid and flexible language is. Prescriptivism shows a lack of curiosity and is also inherently classist. Communicating should be fun and language should adapt to the working class.
Yup, it comes from the half dozen alternate spellings of Wif
Love it, thanks for teaching me something new!
:rat-salute:
No, grammatical genders are not the same as gender. The word "wif" was grammatically neuter, but its definition was still female. Meanwhile "man" was definitionally neutral with "wer" being the counterpart to "wif".
That's another part of the problem with trying to add gender neutral language to a gendered language, they aren't really the same concept.
Native speaker here (also studied it in college), while I'm not against using gender-neutral terms, "Latino" is gender neutral in the sense that the gender of the word is only grammatical. Another example would be "la(s) persona(s)": grammatically, the word is always feminine, but if i referred to someone as a person in Spanish there wouldn't ever be any assumption that that person was female. The same is true of the term Latino, it is masculine but only in the grammatical sense.
With that said, I understand that that isn't intuitive, especially for bilingual speakers like myself who grew up mixing the assumptions of both languages into how we see the world, and support finding an option that is.
Thanks for this perspective. I agree that latinx is very much an imperfect term, but is a good start. Considering it originated with LGBTQ+ people of Latinx heritage in Puerto Rico and North America, I could understand it being a bit clunky in other cultures.
A lot of the hand wringing I see about the word comes from non-speakers obsessing over grammatical rules or bigots attempt to concern troll.
It's super interesting the x found its way into use from some Chicano activists starting off with shifting the spelling to Xicano to emphasize that it comes from the Nahuatl / Aztec language. It then adapted to the end of the word instead (Chicanx) and later shifted over to Latinx.Mostly just mentioning this for anyone reading our convo.
That is interesting, I knew a guy growing up with an "x" name, but never really made that connection. Yeah I think one tricky thing about trying to get a word to stick throughout Latin America is that they already have so many regional differences between how they use words. Every Spanish speaker that's traveled in LatAm as at least one story about how they accidentally prepositioned someone in like Chile or whatever because they didn't study the regional differences in vocabulary and just assumed Spanish is Spanish.
That's also a reason why arguments about Spanish purity are silly, like ask someone from the mountains of Bolivia and someone else from the Caribbean to say something like "desarrollar" and then try and invent a way for there to be one correct "Spanish" way of saying anything.
Right? I love the effort a lot of indigenous activists are putting into further integrating Nahuatl / Aztec into Spanish. There's already tons of it present, especially in Mexico.
Examples off the top of my head: molcajete, aguacate, nopales, etc
100%. It's honestly a great reason for different regions to try out and adapt whatever gender neutral terms work for them.
Totally agree. The concept of one "correct" way to speak Spanish is also pretty based in colonialism.