Googling, that’s a language spoken by less than two million people today.
And?..
For the majority of the people the term represents, the x is difficult to pronounce.
That’s about two million more native speakers than there are for Latin.
No, AFAICT it was coined by, or at least adopted very early on by, Spanish-speaking academics and activists in the US.
I understand that many Spanish speakers not unreasonably reject the term because it’s too phonetically clunky in Spanish, and it seems likely that it’s currently used more by English speakers than by Spanish speakers. But the claim that the term actually originated with clueless woke gringos who simply didn’t understand “how Spanish phonology works” appears to be an urban legend.
That’s mostly what I observe. I use the term in certain contexts. In my experience, it tends to be used by younger, activist Mexican-Americans, a bit more popular in the LGBTQ+ subset of that community. I’ve heard it around for a number of years, but I suspect that common usage is likely not to fall on that term, and it’ll be mostly a linguistic experiment. I could be wrong, and I don’t particularly care — I’ll use whatever word is preferred. I just don’t get a sense it is widely catching on beyond those groups and certain academic pockets. I’m curious to see how it develops.
I’ll preface with the standard “I’m a white guy so it’s not my choice” comment and say that most Hispanics I know think it’s dumb and only use the term ironically, a couple are uninterested-neutral and only my very progressive wife in racial government work actually makes use of it out of the people I know in real life. She comments that she sees it used on Twitter but I think that reflects more on the sort of people regularly using Twitter than any mass acceptance.
To add to this anecdotally, the University at which I used to work had a Latino/a Student Cultural Center. It was run by Hispanic staff members and served the student audience indicated. A few years ago they changed the name to Latinx Student Cultural Center (an internal decision by the people who the center serves, not mandated by the University or anything). So in my limited experience, there are definitely Hispanic people who embrace the term. It is not surprising to me that those people would skew young.
I don’t like it. It’s awkward. I also don’t care for the phrase “persons of color”, because it’s awkward. I wear blue jeans, I don’t wear jeans of blue. Today, in a story about student debt, I ran across the phrase “borrowers or color”. My immediate thought was what color were they borrowing?
Better than having it suggest latrine…
I’m not a member of the group, but I suspect some folk would take issue with applying similar standards to ethnic groups as articles of clothing. A la oriental rugs.
But no one has ever publicly ripped me a new one for using “persons of color”, so I figure it is pretty safe.
Persons of color and colored people don’t refer to the same group, at least not as I’ve encountered the phrases. Colored people means black people. People of color (PoC) means anybody who’s not white, including blacks, many Hispanics, and Polynesians (among others).
It feels like a solution in search of a problem.
That is technically correct, but is simply convention of usage rather than a literal interpretation of terms themselves. And I wasn’t “applying similar standards” to people as I was to clothing, simply using the “blue jeans” thing as an illustration of the awkwardness of the term.
To me, the Latinx debate is similar to the debate around the gender neutral use of “guys” in English. It’s one of the few commonly used English words where there’s not really a obvious gender neutral alternative. People have proposed “folks” or “people” or “y’all” or “guys and gals” or “everyone” but all of them are slightly awkward while other people are exasperated and propose simply redefining guys to now be gender neutral to avoid the debate.
Personally, I think yes it’s slightly harder to avoid using guys compared to other gendered language but difficulty shouldn’t be the mark on whether we try or not. It’s the same argument as, like, calling you “they” is just too hard to remember so I’ll just mispronoun you instead.
I’ll generally with written communication, try to go back and reword anything I write to avoid the use of “guys” but it’ll occasionally slip out when I’m talking because it’s just too hard to avoid.
It’s the same with Latinx, I’m fine with whatever gender neutral word for the term you prefer but I’m not down with the argument that “Latino” is good enough and so we don’t need a new word. If you don’t like Latinx, then propose a better solution and I’m down with it. I wager the majority of people who say Latinx are of the same mindset, just like the majority of people who say “folks” have no particular love of the word “folks”.
The only other English word where I’ve encountered this dilemma is sir/maam but thankfully, this one is slowly fading in relevance as we’ve stopped referring to each other so formally.
I know that. And I suggest most others do as well. But wouldn’t stop someone from loudly proclaiming your insensitivity! 
I do not personally like the term. However, if someone insists I use it for them, I probably would as a form of respect (if I were to say something requiring a similar term).
I hate it, it always sound so out of touch.
'Our Latinx outreach is being led by Dr. ____ _____, they serve as Dean of Diversity at
I’ve never heard the term outside of academia or Democratic campaigns.
But “Hispanic” and “Latino” are not synonymous. “Hispanic” refers to what language a person speaks whereas “Latino” refers to where the person lives. A person from Spain is Hispanic but not Latino (because Spain is not in Latin America) and a person from Brazil is Latino but not Hispanic (because Brazilians speak Portuguese.) You can’t use the two terms interchangeably and be anything close to correct.
Personally I use “Latinx” because I’ve made it a goal to remove gendered language from my vocabulary unless speaking directly of a person whose gender is known to me. The major exception for me is “guys” and “dude” because I’m originally from California and general usage from as far back as I can recall says those two terms are gender neutral.
I taught a college seminar last fall. Student A was a first-generation USian whose parents moved from Mexico to Los Angeles. Student B was from Seattle, had a Chinese-American father and a Caucasian-American mother. One used Latinx regularly. The other used Latino. Yeah, it’s probably what you think:
Student A Latino
Student B Latinx