As a Latino, it mostly gets a " whatever works for you", from me. But I get what was the basic intent, and as D_Seid states, I see it more as an academicism that made its way out into the “civilian” world and can become awkward there when used or encountered by people who don’t quite get where it came from or why use it.
One thing that I do expect to happen is that many in the younger set will adopt Latinx as a way to speak of the community cultural issues in a way distinct from the older generation. So someone like me will be speaking of Latinos and Latinas in the ethnocultural and social rights context of the issues of our time, someone who’s graduating High School today may speak of Latinxs in intersectional contexts of their time. That would be a natural progression/derivation.
OTOH anyone striking through where I write “Latino” and demanding I stick an “x” there will be considered an insufferable asshat. Ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Something that does slightly grate is hearing people from back home saying “Latinx” in the Anglophone pseudopronunciation “Latin-Ex” as lissener describes. In strict Spanish, borrowing the word would mean we should turn it into Latínex rather than just directly port the English version without hispanicizing it at all. But I suppose that just puts me in the prescriptivist crowd with the Real Academia, shaking our walking sticks at the kids on our lawns, again.
Still “LatinEx” will always sound to me like a pharmaceutical product for ear-ringing, or a sealing compound for metal roofs …
(* FWIW, even “Latino” is a sort of artificial term. Some time in the 1800s the (mostly white criollo) litterati of that part of the world wanted to come up with a transnational name that would encompass the Hispano/Luso/Franco-phone nations, as a way to contrast the already rising Anglo power up north, and reached for “Latin” heritage as the reference)
That’s the nutty thing though! It’s the Latinx people who are on the prescriptivist side here! You and I on the good and virtuous side of description!
I would grant that, in the academic world, maybe there’s a need for “Latinx”. The academy often deals in issues that the rest of us don’t, and I have no quibble with them doing whatever is necessary for their work. The problematic thing that happens is that this ends up in the hands of college freshmen who just smoked their first-ever joint with their first-ever black friend, they take their crusade to Tumblr, and next thing you know we have broad agreement that Americans need to tell people from Guatemala how Things Must Now Be Done.
The Pew Research does reflect that sort of trend, and it’s what I notice around here. For example, a couple neighborhoods over, there is a Gage Park Latinx Counci (El Concilio Latinx de Gage Park ), which is younger group of grass roots activists – all Latino/a – that chose to use “Latinx” in naming their organization. Meanwhile, in La Raza (the local Hispanic newspaper), the one oped I could find is against the use of “Latinx” as a gender-neutral moniker.
You’re confusing the gender of the noun with the individuals being described. For example, in French, the noun “personne” is always feminine, regardless of the gender of the personne being described. A king is always “Sa Majesté”, because “Majesté” is a feminine noun.
Insisting that nouns should change gender based on the gender of the individual is imposing English grammar rules on other languages.
Good thing that I did not say that, It was just an observation of what happens in other languages and that I think English has a slight advantage there.
No. Because Latino is an American English word with another language as its origin, like many other American English words. Zhōngguó rén however is not. Words with foreign origins are often subject to American English conventions and usages, modified to fit.
Do you get upset when Americans speak of octopuses and not octopodes? Or would you minimally eyeroll when hearing someone insist that octopus is a Greek word with that plural? Why or why not?
“Actor” is now a non-gendered word. That is how the emerging norm of having a non- gendered word for groups of individuals was applied in that case. Likewise many of us no longer refer to a group of people generically as men, but substitute humans or people. Alternative words used in novel ways counts. That is not as reasonable of an option in the case of Latino/Latnina.
The problem such as it is is tryin to apply that emerging norm to words with no clear extant alternative. The solution apparently is Latinx. No stranger to me than saying they as default.
Appears to me to be a manner of cultural imperialism. And saying well it’s an American English word, not a Spanish one seems to be highlighting the problem, especially when there are millions of Spanish speakers in the US who are now being referred to by this new term.
Wait, I thought you said it was a norm to neutralize gendered groups of people. We’re downgrading to “often subject to now?” I asked for examples of your “norm”, will they be forthcoming?
When I cast about for examples, I find that the opposite trend is in fact the case. We discard colonialist demonyms when we can. For example: you don’t hear folks using ‘Eskimo’ much anymore. Why? Because their name in their own language is ‘Inuit’, which is now the accepted term (as it should be). Same deal with Indians, Hottentots, Pygmies, etc. That is the modern norm around demonyms, not weird academic contrivances.
No, I do not get upset by the spontaneous and organic changes in human language. That would be a weird thing to get upset about. And that’s not what happened with ‘Latinx’. It’s such a weird situation that I can’t even come up with a comparable example.
Yes, now you’re getting it. Now ask a Spanish speaker if the adjective ‘Latino’, without context, refers to a man, a woman, or an inanimate object. Guess what? ‘Latino’ also isn’t gendered. Sure, it has a declension, but idiomatically without context, it’s assumed to be neutral. That’s what ought to be normalized.
The idea that “woke” people are in search of a problem generally comes from those who were unaware of a problem that was in fact widely regarded to exist. They aren’t generally part of the culture in question in which the term was coined, and aren’t the type to go out and check out things outside their own culture.
The idea of a “woke” person is always to be more inclusive. They may be mistaken, but they are never morally wrong to try. So anyone who uses that term disparagingly, like it means they’re bad people, I will tend to ignore their arguments. They are saying that trying to be nice is bad.
See also people who complain about white knighting. Standing up for someone is a good thing. Virtue signaling i similar: stating and standing up for what you believe in is a good thing. Too much of the rhetoric is about trying to make inherently good things into bad things.
Generally, but not universally. This isn’t one of those cases. Sometimes wokeness blunders into rabbit-holes that are just dumb or counterproductive. And this is where you see the downside of wokeness: it cannot admit error. It can only double down. There can be no excess in the pursuit of inclusion. It’s heresy to suggest otherwise.
This is the reason that, even though most regular-Jose native speakers of Spanish correctly judge ‘Latinx’ to be unhelpful and irrelevant gibberish, the wokies will spare no effort trying to make sure it catches on. Hopefully, decades in the future, perhaps Latinx will go the way of Ebonics or similar fads. As I said, wokeness cannot admit error, so we’ll just all agree to believe that it started a useful and productive conversation about identity. We’ll gracefully forget that a handful of people tried to make some bit of faddish academic jargon become a mainstream word. Until the next iteration, at least.
This has turned into something of a hijack, and I’m somewhat responsible for that, so I’ll stop now.
I watch the evening news on Univision and I’ve never heard Jorge Ramos use Latinx. I’ve never used it myself either, and to my ears it just doesn’t sound right.
If using words of foreign origin as American English words is “cultural imperialism”, well I’d say we’d be left with bupkis, but for obvious reasons, not.
You really read “the current norm is increasingly to have a non-gendered word for a group of people”
as “a norm to neutralize gendered groups of people” … nah there is no norm to neutralize gendered groups of people. AND you what we call “words of foreign origin” used as American English words? It’s similar to what we call alternative medicine treatments that are proven to be effective: medicine. Those “foreign origin words used as American English words” are called “American words”. They are properly subject to the conventions of American English (like how the Greek origin “octopus” is pluralized “octopuses” more appropriately than as “octopodes”).
You had to look no farther than “actor”. The word “actress” is scarcely used any more. It is in fact a return: “actor” originally was a gender neutral word but females acting was considered such an exceptional case that they needed to have a segregated space to denote their asterixed status. If you proposing similarly dropping usage of “Latina” in reference to women and referring to women of that culture as “Latinos” … well go for it if you want but I doubt you’ll find many takers.
(And that BTW is how word usage changes happen. It is not imposed. It either catches on, often because it serves a useful function previously unserved, or it dies as a fad, thrown in the quarry … no matter how much those trying to make sure it catches on try. “LatinX” usage is increasing exponentially. Maybe it will die off, maybe not. If it does not it is because it serves some desired otherwise unmet function in American English.)
The use of “they” as the default is of course another obvious example. In my business organization we no longer have “department chairmen” but “department chairs”; the word “congressman” is dropping in usage and “Representative” being used more frequently. I am quite confident you can come up with many yourself.
You say at the beginning that what you describing is not usually the case. But then the rest of your post acts like it’s pretty much always that case. That doesn’t work.
You are mistaken about the Latinx issue. I actually know some Latina feminists who have in fact lamented the gender issue in their language. It’s not woke white people creating the issue out of nothing. And, as you say, Latinx in particular started in academia, which is not just white people.
Furthermore, no one is forcing anyone to use Latinx. It’s just being used. Forcing people would be a mistake, but simply using a new term is not.
It’s also untrue that woke people never realize something was a mistake. The trivial way to show that is to look at woke ideas that are no longer pushed. “I don’t see color” is an example: that woke phrase is now genuinely offensive. Colorblindness is actually listed as one of the most common forms of racism these days.
The point of my post was that this vilification of wokeness doesn’t make sense. They are people trying to be more inclusive. That’s a good thing. There obviously isn’t a such thing as “too inclusive” outside of being inclusive of bad people. The only reason “Latinx” would be a problem would not be because it was too inclusive, but because the people it was intended to help found it offensive.
In short, nothing you are arguing makes any sense to me as someone who, while he would avoid the term “woke,” does try to do the things you describe as “wokeness.” The things you are saying do not describe me or anyone else I know who acts similarly.
Will Latinx catch on? Maybe, if people find it useful. Or maybe not. We’ll see. I currently don’t use it, as it still seems to be an outlier. It seems no more popular than Latin@ or Latino/a. But I won’t count it out, either, or go on about how horrible “woke” people are for trying to be inclusive.
You appear to ignore where I mention the millions of Spanish speakers in this country. It isn’t just creating an American English word but a way of defining the millions of Spanish speakers who live in the US. And with the effect of telling those people that how they define themselves is insufficient. The English and Americans already have a bad reputation in this way - for example Indians changing the English names of their cities to better comport to the local pronunciation than the one the British preferred.
whatever works for you", from me. But I get what was the basic intent, and as D_Seid states, I see it more as an academicism that made its way out into the “civilian” world and can become awkward there when used or encountered by people who don’t quite get where it came from or why use it.