Inside Higher Ed, the downmarket version of Chronicles of Higher Education, has published a piece by Bryan Betancur, assistant professor of Spanish at Furman University and a Colombian-American who writes about issues concerning Latinos. But Betancur would not say “Latinos” as he argues in the following long op-ed, nor would he say “Latinx” which he (and a lot of genuine Latinos as well as yours truly) despises. Betancur’s article is twice as long as it should be, but he does make a couple of good points.
First, he notes, as we already know, that Americans of Latin-America ancestry generally dislike the term “Latinx”:
. . . U.S. politicians (primarily Democrats) continue using “Latinx” in social media posts despite growing evidence that only a small fraction of U.S. adults who identify as Latino or Hispanic (just 3 percent) refer to themselves as Latinx, while as many as four in 10 members of this heterogenous population find the term irksome or offensive.
Check out the links; he’s right.
As you may know, “Latinx” was a term developed by academics and promulgated mainly by the self-styled “in the know” progressive Democrats as the plural for people of Latin-American extraction. Since a male is a “Latino” and a female a “Latina”, it seemed to the wokerati a bit misogynistic to make the word for a group of people the same as the plural for “man”: “Latinos”. They therefore appended an “x” to “Latin,” creating an unpronounceable but ideologically acceptable term. (The same has been done to “women”, getting rid of the offensive “men” part by replacing the “e” with an “x”, creating the equally unpronounceable “womxn”. There’s also the alternative “womyn,” which is touted as less inclusive!
My own objection to “Latinx” is that you can’t pronounce it, and it’s also a performative and nearly useless change that was done to flaunt the virtue of the “progressive” people who confected and who use it. It’s especially bad because Hispanics (the term I use) do not like it or use it, either.
But apparently Betancur agrees with the objectionable nature of “Latinos” as a plural. But his objections aren’t quite the same as the ones given above, for he is woke. He sees Latinx as non-inclusive.
a.) You can’t pronounce it, and that’s an issue for many Hispanics who don’t speak English (“Latinx” can’t be pronounced in Spanish), and who rely more on verbal rather than written communication.
My perspective on “Latinx” changed in 2019 when my mom, who only speaks to me in Spanish, asked me to explain the term’s significance. More accurately, she tried to reference the identifier but was unsure how to pronounce it. Her uncertainty granted me new insight into my discomfort with the term “Latinx.” I could explain gender-inclusive language to my mom but could only spell out terms like queridx, because these words cannot be pronounced in Spanish. The battle against grammatical gender was inaccessible to my mom, who did not attend college and was not about to read a jargony essay on the subject.
If this new linguistic practice did not lend itself to a simple oral explanation to my mom, it also excluded much of my family and the immigrant community in which I grew up. What’s more, the allegedly inclusive language also left out a significant portion of my students at Bronx Community College, many of whom come from backgrounds like mine. I finally understood that the knee-jerk aversion I felt toward “Latinx” stemmed from an unconscious recognition that this linguistic practice was not as inclusive as its many adherents, including myself, claimed.
Following that conversation, I scoured the internet for critiques of “Latinx” and found an edifying interview with Mexican linguist Concepción Company. Company asserts that using language in a manner that yields words such as amigx privileges writing over orality and excludes groups, such as some Indigenous communities, that lack formal writing systems These populations are thus denied equal opportunity to participate in activism via language. My family, my community and my students were not the only ones left out of the Latinx conversation.
b.) The term is therefore not inclusive but divisive:
My perspective on “Latinx” changed in 2019 when my mom, who only speaks to me in Spanish, asked me to explain the term’s significance. More accurately, she tried to reference the identifier but was unsure how to pronounce it. Her uncertainty granted me new insight into my discomfort with the term “Latinx.” I could explain gender-inclusive language to my mom but could only spell out terms like queridx, because these words cannot be pronounced in Spanish. The battle against grammatical gender was inaccessible to my mom, who did not attend college and was not about to read a jargony essay on the subject.
. . . If this new linguistic practice did not lend itself to a simple oral explanation to my mom, it also excluded much of my family and the immigrant community in which I grew up. What’s more, the allegedly inclusive language also left out a significant portion of my students at Bronx Community College, many of whom come from backgrounds like mine. I finally understood that the knee-jerk aversion I felt toward “Latinx” stemmed from an unconscious recognition that this linguistic practice was not as inclusive as its many adherents, including myself, claimed.
In other words, he’s using a woke argument against a woke term (my bolding):
Arguments that emphasize the use of “Latinx” among English speakers implicitly separate persons of Latin American descent into two groups: monolingual Spanish speakers and those who were born in the U.S. and primarily speak English. This de facto division runs counter to assertions that “Latinx” denotes inclusivity. Some descendants of Latin American immigrants might not feel a strong attachment to Spanish, but that does not mean the language in its spoken form ought to be dismissed. For the more than 460 million native speakers in the world, Spanish is not an abstract remnant of colonialism but a lived means of communication. Expecting a multinational ethnic group to tolerate language simply because it is acceptable to English speakers is linguistic imperialism under the guise of social progress.
Following that conversation, I scoured the internet for critiques of “Latinx” and found an edifying interview with Mexican linguist Concepción Company. Company asserts that using language in a manner that yields words such as amigx privileges writing over orality and excludes groups, such as some Indigenous communities, that lack formal writing systems These populations are thus denied equal opportunity to participate in activism via language. My family, my community and my students were not the only ones left out of the Latinx conversation.
So what term does the sweating professor want to use? I guess “Hispanic” isn’t good enough (I suppose you could make some kind of argument for geographical accuracy, but do we really care?) As the Pew Poll notes, most people of “Latino” extraction in the U.S. actually prefer “Hispanic”:
A majority (61%) say they prefer Hispanic to describe the Hispanic or Latino population in the U.S., and 29% say they prefer Latino. Meanwhile, just 4% say they prefer Latinx to describe the Hispanic or Latino population.
But Betancur likes the new term “Latine”, with the neutral “e” at the end, a usage that, he says, is gaining ground in Latin America in terms like “amigues” for “friends.” It is not only inclusive, but easy to pronounce:
But when it comes to “Latinx” and “Latine,” the question is not a matter of personal choice, as many claim. This assertion creates a false equivalence between the terms. I use “Latine” because inclusive language should not value literacy over orality, English over Spanish, or the ivory tower over the greater community.
But why not “Hispanic”?
This is, of course, a tempest in a teapot. I could just as well campaign for the elimination of “Jews” as a pejorative plural, and insist on using “Jewish people” to emphasize our status as human beings. But I can’t be bothered. (Of course, “Jewess” is no longer a viable word for a Jewish female (have they been erased?), so perhaps even “Jews”, construed as plural for the formerly male term “Jew”, should now be “Jewx”.)
From the Pew Poll:
h/t: Wayne
All three paragraphs from the first quote from the source article seem to be repeated further down. I find it a little bit confusing.
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Personally, I dislike “latinx” mainly because of the “x” on the end (my Mac’s spell checker flags it as a spelling mistake too). That’s also my main problem with new non binary pronouns like “xi”.
If most hispanics do not like latinx, that seems reason enough to me not to use it and it seems ironic that a term meant to improve inclusivity cannot even be pronounced in the preferred language of some of those it tries to include.
“It’s got an “x” in it.”
-Christopher Robin
Winnie-The-Pooh, Chapter 8
There’s Unix, Linux, and also those hip car models with an “x” – seems mostly at the beginning, though – and sometimes just an “x”…
But I digress…
(Since discovering the historic operating system, I’ve learned to “do better” and pronounce it “uni-ex.”)
What about the letter ‘Y’, rather than the overused ‘X’? As someone who has never lived in the US, the artificial distinction of ‘Latino’, as distinct from ‘White’, seems a peculiar North American affectation, much like the use of imperial measurements rather than proper SI units. Latino/Hispanic as distinct from White does not appear to be a recognised social category in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Oceania.
Besides, with the woke tsunami, who knows what other artificial appellations will be conjured in the future to pander to minority academic affectations. With these aspects in mind, surely it would be logical to completely ditch ‘Latino’ in favour of ‘WhiteY’, a new term with no gender presuppositions. ‘WhiteY’ has the advantage of demonstrating the affinity between Latino and White, a distinction which is almost never observed elsewhere, globally. Who could be offended by the usage, ‘WhiteY’? This leaves 25 letters of the Roman alphabet left for other chipper distinctions. For instance ‘WhiteW’, referring to ultra-woke Whites. ‘WhiteI’s for ‘White-adjacent’ very rich South Asians, such as the Microsoft and Google boss categories, etc.
Though in “Unix” and “Linux,” the “x” is preceded by a vowel. I hate “latinx” for aesthetic reasons and the pronunciation issues – the word just sounds awful to me. I’m happy it’s meeting resistance. “Latine” sounds much better to me and I would have no objection to using it.
Vowels? Pronunciation? How DEHUMANIZING. This is PEOPLE we are talking about!
^^^satirical – or something – in case that wasn’t clear
I seem to recall that, back before the push to have a term that explicitly denoted women, Latina (hence Latino), people just said Latin, as in ‘Latin lover,’ or ‘She’s a Latin from Manhattan.’ Why would Latine be preferable to Latins? (Or perhaps we should just stop trying to lump people from different countries into one broad group on the assumption that they are all alike?)
“Latin” was spoken by Roman Colonialist Imperialists. Using that word would trigger the Goths.
And that’s never a good idea. Many of them have sharpened fingernails and lots of metallic piercings and stuff.
Shouldn’t that be Gothx?
Clearly it should be pronounced “latin-ex“, with an emphasis on the last bit while looking around to make sure people take notice.
Indeed!
How often do we really need a word to describe a diverse group of people who share a language but little else?
I would not need to come up with some new term that puts a Haitian, a Cajun from Louisiana, and a resident of Luxembourg in the same set. “French-speaking” suffices.
It seems like another effort by the far left to try to cram diverse people into a single group, defined primarily by their invented word. They want them to think of themselves as a race, to see themselves as oppressed, and to raise the red flag of revolution, under the direction of wealthy coastal US liberals.
The word “Latino” really should include Italian speakers as well.
People who need to obsessively categorize everyone into little racial boxes are exactly the sort of people who tend to wear skulls on their caps.
Leaving aside the politics, I find this fascinating from a linguistic perspective. First, it is in the nature of Latin-based languages to be sexist (most, anyway–I have no knowledge of Romanian), yet I hear no clamor among the French to refer to their friends as “amix.”
And what does one shout to applaud musicians, for example?
Single male: Bravo!
Single female: Brava!
Plural female: Brave!
Plural male OR MIXED: Bravi!
I suppose that that last should now be “Bravx!”
I note that if one objects to “Hispanic” in that it leaves out the Indigenous here in the New World (and think about the political implications of THAT term for a moment), that situation is hardly improved by using Latino/a/e/x.
Mi querida, who is a professional interpreter/translator AND of both Iberian and Indigenous extraction, is bemused by the whole thing. According to her, the correct term for the plural, IF one is to use “Latino,” rather than “Hispanic,” is “Latinos.” ¡Punto final!
I recall from ~ 2000 (?) many of South American descent preferred “Latino” since “Hispanic” referenced colonizer Spain. My perception is that “Latino” indeed became the dominant term (where I live, in California), but I don’t have any actual data on that.
But the “Latin” in “Latino” is also a reference to Spain, albeit an indirect one.
People should be called what they want to be called, not some made up neologism that exists only to signal how virtuous one is. There is no virtue in calling people anything other than what they prefer. This is obviously a first world problem (oops, that’s probably a verboten phrase) and will, I hope, resolve itself soon so that we can get on to more pressing problems.
Regarding “Jewish people,” my position is that “Jews” is perfectly fine. I don’t feel any more human by having my ethnicity turned into an adjective, rather than a noun. It’s not helpful, it’s an extra word, it’s unnecessary, and it’s a little bit annoying because I know where this not-so-brilliant idea comes from and I don’t like it. (But I’m not going to get all bunched up about it either.)
When I was a teenager I hesitated to say “Jew” and always tried to say “Jewish” to soften it. As if this were more polite. Then I met many Jews, who were proud to call themselves Jews, and I realized that these qualms were nonsense.
English and Spanish both have three grammatical genders–masculine, feminine and neuter– which need not correspond to ‘natural’ gender. Spanish has agreement in gender between nouns and adjectives (English doesn’t), and Spanish much more frequently uses a word’s ending to indicate natural gender: in English, deer may be harts or does, but in Spanish they are ciervos or ciervas. You can see how gender affects Spanish by translating the English phrase “the most interesting programs”. In Spanish it’s “los programas mas interesantes“. Los is masculine, programas is, despite the “a” ending, also masculine, and interesantes is neuter. In English, gender doesn’t come into it at all.
You could create a neuter neologism in Spanish for Latino– which is what Betancur prefers. But, as far as I have seen, “Latinx” was never intended to be a Spanish word– it was used by English-speakers who didn’t like the borrowing of Latino from Spanish into English, because, unlike most English words, it wasn’t neuter. But if you don’t like Spanish words because they have gender, then just use the neuter English word which the Spanish borrowing was intended to replace. As DrBrydon says above, it’s “Latin,” which in English is neuter. Latin has long been used in English, with the currently intended meaning, as in “Latin America”. One of the most prominent organizations of Hispanics in the USA is the “League of United Latin American Citizens”. “Latinx” was an attempt to fill a linguistic hole that didn’t exist.
GCM
I think “interesantes” is still masculine, it’s just that masculine and feminine are identical for that adjective. The neuter in Spanish is very restricted, limited to a few pronouns such as “esto”/”this thing” (m:”este”, f:”esta”) and the construction “lo + adjective” to turn an adjective into a noun, such as “lo interesante es…” = “the interesting thing is…”, in which case the masculine form of the adjective is used for adjectives which inflect for gender. Most neuter nouns from Latin became masculine in Spanish, like your example “programa” (a Latin neuter originally from Greek).
Source: what I remember from learning Spanish 10+ years ago. Happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable.
My wife (Spanish on her mother’s side) fondly remembers her Spanish (language) teacher explaining, to her all-female class, why it is “un problema” and not “una problema” – “Los problemas son masculinos!”
Regarding your preference for Hispanic over Latino, what is the motivation for this preference? People from Brazil, for example, are Latino, but not Hispanic. Ultimately, this is just a matter of preference. I’m just curious because I always assumed those terms were not interchangeable.
That particular ship has sailed. For all practical intents and purposes, Brazilians are not really considered “Latino” either. Look at the US census definition for example: “OMB defines “Hispanic or Latino” as a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.”
The terms are defined explicitly as interchangeable and implicitly declare all “Hispanic or Latino” as Spanish speakers. This is probably because whoever came up with the definition was too ignorant to know that the most widely spoken language in South America isn’t Spanish, let alone that literal hundreds of other languages are spoken there, but the net effect is that every discussion of “Latinos” excludes Brazilians (and Guyanese, Surinamese, indigenous people in Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia…), so might as well go the full mile and enjoy not being pigeonholed into some made-up identity anyway.
” . . . too ignorant to know that the most widely spoken language in South America isn’t Spanish . . . .”
So, pray tell, what is the most widely spoken language?
I’m guessing it’s the Portuguese spoken by 214 million Brazilians who account for half the total population of South America. In Guyana they speak English, Dutch in Suriname, French in (French) Guiana. All three of these non-Hispanic countries amount to substantial numbers. So Spanish loses out on those grounds alone even if not every single person in Brazil speaks Portuguese and even if all the indigenous people in the Spanish-speaking countries do speak Spanish as well as their native tongues.
I first saw the term in writing, so it took me a little while to realize it wasn’t pronounced la-tinks. It’s still the first way my inner voice wants to interpret it.
And yeah, no one in my wife’s extended family (she moved here from Mexico as a child) uses the term Latinx. Out of the ones that have even heard of it, they think it’s rather silly.
I thought Latinx was pronounced Latinequis in Spanish. To say Latinx can’t be pronounced in Spanish seems to suggest Spanish speakers have no word for X. They do, of course. It’s equis, as in Dos Equis.
My question is, if individuals get to pick their pronouns to match their gender identity, why not for their ethnic gender? Isn’t it the same logic? Don’t mis-ethnicisze me!
The notoriously liberal occupants of the Isle of Man got there first with Manx.
The DEI Committee decrees that inhabitants of the Isle of Man should be called “Manxx”. And the Latinx will soon be renamed Hispanix.
As for myself, I like to identify myself as Russianx. It’s not real, but since the body I
should have been born in is that of lineal descendent of Ivan the Terrible, I am a claimant to Tsardom of the Russianx Empire.
Isn’t “Tsardom” a bit gendered, you bigot! 😉
Edited to add: This was meant to be a response to Max Blancke at #5
I think you’re looking for the noun “francophone”. The term implies nothing besides the ability to converse in French. “French-speaking” is a common adjective for a francophone here in Canada (and probably globally).
βPer