Though I'm an American, I speak a little German and have friends who speak Spanish/French/Italian (either natively as they were born in a country that speaks those languages or they learned it). The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word. It makes no sense, and it's non-pronounceable (or at least difficult to pronounce) in Romance languages.

As a native speaker of American English, I find Latinx to be either unpronounceable or lacking in an obviously correct pronunciation. Is it La-tinks? Or Latin-exks? The natural English construction of an adjective derived from “latin” that lacks gender would he just “latin”, not “latinx”, as English doesn’t have gendered adjectives in the first place.

(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)

I think it's just more political correctness gone wild. The vast majority of Spanish speakers in America are from Mexico but it somehow became derogatory to refer to them as "Mexican". How is that any different than calling somebody a Puerto Rican or a Brazilian? It simply denotes their place of origin.

>The thing that has always perplexed me about "Latinx" is that the those pushing that formulation are grafting what is a Germanic language construction onto a Latin-based word.

To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.

The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.

Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people. Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.

>Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?

>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.

Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?

I would claim "womxn" is not pronounceable in many other languages as well. My native language is German and whenever I see this I can't help but wonder how anyone would voluntarily agree with such an unelegant abuse of a word.

I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.

>I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation.

What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.

I said Latinx is an English word mostly.

Many Hispanic people are natively bilingual. Many speak English primarily.

Folx sounds like it looks. Womxn sounds like woman or women usually. Latin@ depends on the speaker. Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

> Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.

...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...

Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.

On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.

I’m still skeptical it came from Hispanic people at all and not some handful of rich white sophomores at a private university, but it doesn’t actually matter because it is used far more frequently by wealthy whites than by any of the victim groups they purport to protect.

That's a pretty common misconception, but the correct pronunciation of Latinx is (lah-tinks).

It was supposed to rhyme with "thinks" from its inception.

I went to CU-Boulder and a part of the Latinx community, trust me, this is a quite hurtful anglo-ization of our tribe.

I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. "La-tinks" is just as much of an anglo-ization as pronouncing it like "Kleenex". There aren't a lot of cases in Spanish where three consonants are mashed together. Especially not ending with an "s" sound.

In fact, Spanish syllables only end in up to two consonant sounds (nearly always "ns" or "ks"), unlike English which can end in up to four consonant sounds (e.g. "texts").

Texts might end in four consonants in some underlying representation, but does anyone actually pronounce it that way? I think I reduce it to “Tex” unless I make a conscious effort to enunciate.

Yeah that's probably the case - I'm in the same boat (two consonants as in "tex" unless I consciously try to enunciate it in full).

Three consonant endings do get routinely pronounced in full in English though, e.g. "thinks".

> > Latinx came from LGBT Hispanic people.

> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.

Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture

I thought about that, but the claim was that it came from that community, which is still hard to believe when it's a language construction that is really only common in elite white circles, evidenced by the polling data cited up-thread.

The polling data cited up-thread doesn't even include "elite white circles."

>3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it.

Who is using this term if it is not people who it is ostensibly used to describe? I can venture a guess.

All of these meaningless labels were given to us by the so-called "elites" to keep us distracted... that same distraction is what allows of the continued manufacturing of consent.

But who are "US Latino adults" to begin with? This kind of statistic is based on an egregious confusion between ethnicity and citizenship, familiarity with languages, "communities" and subcultures. Labeling people (particularly other people) is problematic in itself.

"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.

Are you using "sophisticated" as another word for "elites"?

Culturally sophisticated, enough to care about such things.

But I suspect there are many people who consider anyone smarter than them "elites" regardless of their actual social standing.

Let’s not forget that womxn is actually allegedly transphobic, as Twitch learned the hard way recently.

I always pronounced it as Latinsk, which funny enough is the Danish word for Latin.

I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this. On the other hand, right across the Hispanic world it's very common to use @ for gender neutrality: nosotr@s, latin@s, etc.

> I'm Peruvian and married to a Colombian and have never heard of this.

That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).

That's pretty genius IMO, given how the @ symbol looks a bit like both an 'a' and an 'o'.

Interesting, how do you pronounce those words with the @ in them?

It's only for written communication. When speaking you either use the gender neutral(male) form, or a conjunction of both. e.g.: "latinos y latinas"

Is this in any way surprising? In Latin countries, everyone is used to gendered nouns as that’s a core feature of the language. In Anglo cultures it is not.

Most Latino people are also less "touchy feely" about these subjects. See for example the brouhaha around South American football players like Edison Cavani using words like "negrito" in affectionate terms.

South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.

Latin America isn't North America. There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish. And these people weren't wiped out in most cases. They mixed with the colonizers to varying degrees and are now those you call Latinos. The reason people from the older Hispano-American colonies often look *nothing* like Spaniards and Portuguese people is simply because they're partially or fully indigenous.

North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.

> Latin America isn't North America.

A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa.

> There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish.

Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that.

And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.

What does the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Latin America have to do with the use of "Latinx"

Sure, tell me: What does the Spanish/Portuguese conquest of Latin America have to do with the use of "Latinx"? It doesn't help it, it does it. There are different native ethnicities still living and trying to maintain their culture and then US cultural imperialists go put everyone into one bucket and call it a day.

That wasn't the comment I was responding to was it. my comment was about Spanish and Latin Americans in denial about racism and their colonial past

I remember when I first saw latinx, I thought it meant something about a Latin mixer or Latin cross exchange, or cross pollination. I had no idea it was a regex metacharacter for `a` or `o`, essentially latin[ao].

Latin[ao] sounds like Spanish slang for "latinized"... I could actually imagine this catching on more than latinx.

It also makes more logical sense.

I don't think changing the language is necessary, but if we're adding regex to English. COUNT ME IN!

Oh dear god no, any random passerby could say something requiring exponential time to parse. :P

Thank you for finally providing a definition.

I was so surprised at this Latinx controversy because I learned it from a Venezuelan refugee (to the US) about 8 years ago. I didn't hear it from some "woke" white person. It's wild that it turned into a big internet controversy.

The statistics suggest your experience is atypical. It’s not that controversial IMO; it’s just a particularly egregious data point on the list of data points that suggest the woke don’t actually represent the groups they purport to speak for (which is the principal rationale behind their bid for social power), contrary to the impression we’re fed by the media. See also the statistics on black support for abolishing police.

The statistics also suggest that anyone who uses the term, Hispanic or not, is atypical.

The large number of people I know who use that term, though, are [that word you will apparently be annoyed that I use ;P] and not white allies or something. Also: I feel like maybe you are mixing up Latino and Hispanic? Someone can be Latino/a and simultaneously Anglophonic. It doesn't surprise me that people who are Hispanic don't care as much or even find the construction annoying, as it doesn't work well in their language... but why, exactly, does that matter?

I was surprised to see it used on the article itself.