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Comment by mastazi | Hacker News Reader

I'm Italian and I speak Spanish and Portuguese relatively fluently.

Using the term "Latinx" in my opinion is a form of cultural appropriation, because it imposes a way of using grammatical gender that is typical of the English language (think e.g. about the "singular they") upon neo-latin languages where the perception of grammatical gender is very different. In neo-latin languages such as Italian or Spanish, grammatical gender doesn't have the same weight that it has in English, e.g. when I think about "scrivania" or "armadio" (those are the Italian words for "desk" and "closet", the former is feminine and the latter is masculine) I don't imagine in my mind that the desk has feminine features, or that the closet is somehow manly. This is just not how those languages work.

Edit: when I speak English I'm absolutely in favour of things like singular they. I'm just saying that this doesn't work as well in other languages.

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I was wondering if it was just internet bias that made “latinx” look unpopular, but no - it’s pretty unpopular in real life as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinx

> Surveys of Hispanic and Latino Americans have found that most prefer other terms such as Hispanic and Latina/Latino to describe themselves, and that only 2 to 3 percent use Latinx.[1][2] A 2020 Pew Research Center survey found that roughly three-quarters of U.S. Latinos were not aware of the term Latinx; of those who were, 33% said it should be used to describe their racial or ethnic group, while 65% said it should not.[3][2]

Honestly, with support that poor I’m not sure why you’d bother.

(Aside, but iOS doesn’t even recognize latinx as a word)

Thank you for saying this. This has been my pet peeve for a while now.

LatinX is not just appropriation, it's cultural imperialism at its finest.

It's the "woke" American cultural hegemony trying to dictate what the Latino community can call itself. It's almost disrespectful to our autonomy, our culture and heritage.

And I say this as someone who's completely pro the gender-neutral language revolution in his native tongue, Spanish.

Latinos can call themselves whatever they want, we don't need the US to start telling us how we need to gender-neutralize our community.

The feeling you’ve described is how many Americans feel about the woke telling them how they can speak too.

I don't think its cultural appropriation. It's not like people saying that are adapting features from latin people and adding it to their own culture. In fact, it is sort of the opposite. It is people forcing the latin culture into their own framework. Not sure how to term that, but not at all cultural appropriation.

I think you are right, maybe the correct term would be "linguistic imperialism" because it forces something typical of the English language onto a Spanish word?

I have studied Spanish and am currently studying Portuguese (my partner is Brazilian) and I think about this a lot. I would take the other side of the bet here. I would bet that this deeply ingrained gendering of objects does show up elsewhere and influence attitudes. Surely there have been studies on this? Of course I respect your experience as a native speaker and the fact that you know more native speakers than I do, but right now we're just battling anecdotes.

There are studies that show that polyglot speakers tend to think in slightly different ways when they switch languages. It is probably true that speaking a language where every noun is gendered might slightly change the way you think, but in my personal opinion not in the way you imagine.

What I mean is that when masculine or feminine are used to describe mundane everyday objects, it's very well possible that the idea of masculinity or femininity might be de-emphasised in the mind of the native speaker, rather than reinforced.

I'm learning German at the moment. Everything is gendered. Such a strange way of looking at the world.

And the unfortunate "das Mädchen" [0] - the German word for "young woman" is neutral gender (because it's a compound noun and the "-chen" suffix is neutral). I wonder how that affects German society when all young women are objects. Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/M%C3%A4dchen

Interesting I didn't know that. In Italian there is no neutral gender, Latin had it but in modern Italian it has been lost.

> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

My hypothesis is that having it might de-emphasise the link between grammatical gender and gender identity of a person, this link is very strong in the English language because in English the only time you use gendered language you are talking about a person, in those other languages you use gendered words to refer to a pot or a chair :-)

Theres also “das kind” (the child). And I’m sure other examples. You simply don’t understand how other languages work, and you’re projecting your own ideas onto them.

And German is a whole different class than Latin and Slavic languages - AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German. In contrast, in Spanish, Italian (not sure about French) and Slovenian words actually “sound” either feminine or masculine (or neutral, but those are rarer and mostly for inanimate objects), because gender is based on word endings.

Yes. I am projecting my own ideas on them. That's how brains work. Also the wonderful nature of travel is being exposed to other cultures and their strange ideas about the planet. This isn't negative.

Yeah, I gather that Germans intuit the gender of a new word - it just "feels" masculine or feminine (or neutral). Fascinating.

> AFAIK there’s now way to “tell” the gender of a word in German

That's incorrect, there are rules. (These rules have a few exceptions.)

m: -en, -er, -ig, -ismus, -ist, -ling, -m, -or

f: -ät, -e, -ei, -enz, -heit, -ie, -ik, -in, -ion, -keit, -schaft, -ung, -ur

n: -chen, -lein, -ment, -nis, -tum, -um

That makes the proposed contrast weaker than you initially thought.

If anything, the contrast is stronger.

Slovenian: -a feminine, -o, -e neutrum, rest masculine. (Again, some exceptions.)

Italian and Spain is probably even simpler, since there’s no neutrum.

> the contrast is stronger

That's mathematically impossible.

> Does this de-emphasise their femininity, or increase their "sexual object"-ness?

Or secret option c): it has absolutely no effect on how they treat their women because they aren't actually that dumb.

Things that are “different” are not “strange.”

they are to me. Is there a problem with being "strange" to someone from a different culture?

The word strange implies otherness and inferiority.

not to me. I love strange things. They challenge my status quo.

Totally agree with your "other side of the coin" assessment that this gendering of everyday objects could diminish the importance of gender overall.

To my original point, one of the most interesting examples that I can think of is how you gender groups of humans in Spanish or Portuguese. If I understand correctly, no matter the distribution of the group, the group becomes masculine once there is one man in it. It could be 999 females and 1 male and the proper way to label it is masculine.

Yes the group becomes masculine no matter the distribution, this is also the case in Italian. If I remember this correctly, this is because the old Latin neutral gender, in those modern languages, has been assimilated into the masculine gender. (If you study Latin you might notice that in many cases the neutral terminations are more similar to the masculine ones so, in a way, it makes sense that at some point the line started to blur I guess).

My understanding of historical linguistics is that gendering in Indo-European languages has its roots in animate vs inanimate objects, with a feminine category splitting later on from the animate category (possibly as a way to distinguish singular from collective initially, before being retrofitted to « female » things later on).

Add on nouns shifting meaning over time and you've got a relationship between grammar and sex that is extremely loose. I'd take any notion that it « influences attitude » with extreme carefulness.

> I'd take any notion that it « influences attitude » with extreme carefulness.

For sure. Similar to sociobiology, my original line of thinking can quickly lead to some offensive ideas.

Oh, absolutely. The appearance of "x" instead of the "a" or "o" is an immediate signal of someone who is trying to signal wokeness, but isn't actually.

Signalling wokeness is wokeness. It's not like there's some authentic wokeness - calling it wokeness is accusing it of being inauthentic.

Okay; and that's fine by me, as I do consider it a rather shallow minded concept anyway. But it does mean something in certain communities, and there are indicators when someone is mouthing words without understanding their meaning or weight. To claim there isn't an "authentic wokeness" is not exactly correct.

Imperialism has continued, but it’s just been rebranded as a pseudo-religious movement. There is only one Truth and any cultures that disagree are “behind” or “anti-progressive.”

"BY THIS SIGN YOU WILL CONQUER."

Not even speaking about languages without gendered nouns. :) Sometimes I use she instead of he or the other way around, and the listeners likely don't realize that I have to pay extra attention using he/she when talking about people because my mother tongue doesn't even have a similar concept whatsoever.

Anyway, we know that most of the time it's not about actually respecting the other person.

I have a problem that is somehow similar to yours. In Italian, the grammatical gender of possessive pronouns works the other way around, e.g. if a boy has a girlfriend, in English you say "his girlfriend", "his" is masculine. But in Italian, possessive pronouns work the other way around ("la sua ragazza", where "sua" is feminine). To this day I still get it wrong sometimes e.g. if I'm tired at the end of a long day.

I have noticed this in some speakers (for example finns and chinese), and thought that this might be the cause. :)

It seems Latinx is a word used in some circles the U.S. and it's a word choice specific to their language. Much like how the U.S. use of plain "America" is contentious in the rest of Latin America - words have different meanings in different contexts and spheres, but there's is conflict when it leaks outside the boundaries.

Ha, I always thought the ‘x’ was for eXtended, like the + in LBGTQ+. Anyways, yes all of my South American friends think it’s bullshit corporate speak.

"Latinx" is not cultural appropriation. On the contrary, it was coined by people of Latin American heritage who feel uncomfortable with the gender binary or who have an explicit non-binary gender identity. These people felt unrepresented by their own native language, so they tried to find a term they could use to describe themselves that would make them feel comfortable. There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on. And Spanish is far from the only language where this is happening - native speakers of many gendered languages who are non-binary have been trying to find ways to assert their identity in their own language.

Personally, I don't use "Latinx" in normal, everyday conversation. "Latino" or (in English) "Latin American" works fine. But if I know I am speaking about a group of people where there are non-binary members who care about this, or if the topic is diversity/inclusion in particular, then I try to use Latinx. Why not? There's nothing appropriative about trying to use language that marginalized people have asked we use to better include them.

> it was coined by people of Latin American heritage

Were they predominantly people of Latin American heritage who lived in Latin America and spoke Spanish or Portuguese, or people of Latin American heritage whose primary language might have been English because they lived in a predominantly English speaking country?

Let's say a person of Latin American heritage, but whose everyday language is English, modifies their Latin American language in ways that conform to the English language. How do we evaluate that?

Yes, I agree that we could not call it appropriation, because that person is indeed of Latin American heritage, but is this not still a form of "cultural imperialism", where a language that is dominant for political or economical reasons imposes itself over other languages?

And does it not become cultural appropriation later on, the moment that word spreads and becomes mainstream mostly among people of non Latin American heritage, while Latin Americans seldom use it to refer to themselves?

> There have been other attempts too, like "Latine", "Latin@" and so on.

Yes, it is true that there have been some attempts at making the language more gender neutral in other languages too, as I said above I'm Italian and I saw some attempts in Italian as well, things like "Cara/o cliente..." ("Dear customer..." where "dear" has both the feminine and masculine termination, separated with a slash). And I don't have issue with those attempts.

But I take issue specifically with this: why attempting to make the language more gender neutral, using a device (grammatically neutral words) that is typical of the English language and doesn't really exist in Spanish? I am of the opinion that you can use an inclusive language while still speaking Spanish, e.g. you could say "Latinos y Latinas", or for brevity you could write both terminations with a slash like in the Italian example above, there is no need to force an English language device onto Spanish.

I really don't see this as something worth making a fuss about. Languages change all the time based on how people use them in the real world. Concepts and ideas that did not exist 100 years ago do exist today, and the language evolves to express those.

Given Spanish is spoken as a first language by hundreds of millions of people in tens of countries around the world, I don't think it should be seen as a problem that some of those Spanish-speaking people are finding new ways to express an experience that perhaps other Spanish-speaking people don't find relevant to them. There are 40 million native Spanish speakers in the United States, and millions more who speak it as a second language. At least some proportion of those consider themselves non-binary, and would like to have a term that explicitly recognizes that identity. (Note that your suggestion of "Latinos y Latinas" does not explicitly include non-binary identities.)

I don't think it really matters if "Latinx" is a word that was developed in the United States by people who live there. It might be a bit crass to refer to people across the entirety of Latin America using that term, but I don't see anybody doing that.

As far as appropriation goes: just like Spanish, the English language is evolving too. Sometimes we adopt foreign terms into English, and often we bastardize them, and that's not considered especially remarkable. We took "diva" from Italian and use it for both female and male "divi". I don't think that's cultural appropriation.

To be clear, I am not an American, so I am sympathetic to your view that American politics and culture tends to push itself into other countries. Here on HN that happens a lot. But I don't think this particular term is something worth worrying about. The way I see it there are many worse things Americans could be doing than creating a new word that people there have a use for.

> I really don't see this as something worth making a fuss about.

I see it as a problem when it's used to identify a minority that overwhelmingly rejects this term as it's been noted elsewhere in this thread. That's something that is usually true of racial slurs. Of course, I'm not saying that Latinx is a racial slur, but that it shares this characteristic with racial slurs.

> Languages change all the time based on how people use them in the real world.

Of course, but that doesn't justify forcing terms onto minorities.

> Note that your suggestion of "Latinos y Latinas" does not explicitly include non-binary identities.

I think it does, because in Spanish, Italian and similar languages the masculine grammatical gender is also used for plurals where the grammatical gender is indeterminate (it's used as a substitute of the neutral gender, due to the fact that we don't have the neutral gender in our grammar)[1]. That is why I fail to see how someone who is a native speaker of those languages, and is familiar with the grammar, would find that definition non-inclusive. Unless they were projecting a way of thinking that is typical of the English language (where grammatical gender = gender identity) onto that other language.

> As far as appropriation goes: just like Spanish, the English language is evolving too. Sometimes we adopt foreign terms into English, and often we bastardize them, and that's not considered especially remarkable. We took "diva" from Italian and use it for both female and male "divi". I don't think that's cultural appropriation.

Yes of course you are right. But people don't use "diva" exclusively to refer to people of Italian descent - so it's not the same as "Latinx", which is being used to define a minority - which overwhelmingly rejects that term apparently. Speaking of Italian words assimilated into the English language - my personal pet peeve is English speaking people saying "Bravo!" at the end of an exhibition, even if the performer is not a woman ("bravo" is masculine).

> I am sympathetic to your view that American politics and culture tends to push itself into other countries. Here on HN that happens a lot.

Yes, sometimes in HN discussions it's considered as a given that they are talking about the USA and I often interject and ask "in what country?" I'm like the "internationalist police" of this forum ahah :-D

[1] An example would be: "Tutti gli italiani, uomini e donne, dovrebbero vaccinarsi" - "All Italians, men and women, should get the vaccine" - "Italiani" is grammatically masculine but it's being used as a neutral here. To an external observer this might seem masculinist, or you might see it the other way around (the masculine grammatical gender ends up being de-emphasised because it's often used for non-masculine nouns).

I am not sure where the evidence is that people "overwhelmingly reject" the term, or that anyone classifies it as a racial slur.

The Pew study that is commonly cited[0] makes it clear that 76% of Latino or Hispanic identifying people have not even heard of the term. Only 3% use it, increasing to 7% amongst younger people (18-29) and 14% among young women. The study also notes that most people of that background prefer to be called Hispanic, which makes sense because Hispanic is an older term in the first place, and it is also the term used in US government documents like the census. Of the 23% who have heard of the term, only 12% "disagree or dislike" it, with a far greater number understanding that it is useful as a gender-neutral or LGBTQ-inclusive term. This really is not the kind of big deal that some people are making it out to be.

This has all happened before, of course. For example, in the 70s some American women started to refer to themselves as "womyn". The term grew popular amongst some groups, and it's listed in the dictionary, but it never really caught on. Around the same time some American activists decided to take an actual slur - queer - and reclaim that as a term to describe everyone under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. Plenty of Ls and Gs and Bs and Ts were not happy about that, but eventually the term stuck, and now most people in that group would probably accept the fact that "queer" is a valid umbrella term, even if amongst themselves they still use a more specific or more old-fashioned terminology.

I see "Latinx" as just another one of these linguistic trends. Maybe it will catch on, maybe it won't. For now, it's pretty well-established in HR departments of big American tech companies, so if you work in tech and you're talking about HR... Then it makes sense to use the term. In other contexts, well that's up to you.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Yes I agree with you I guess we will see whether it will catch on or not. It just seems to me like a term made by an elite and then forced upon everyone else, rather than a term that grew in usage organically, from the bottom up. But maybe I'm wrong.

3% of Hispanics use the term, and an overwhelming majority believe it should never be used to describe them. [1]

Honestly it's disgusting it's still in use. When does it be come a slur given it's used against a population against their wishes?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/11/about-one-in...

Hispanic != Latino/a/x

They're not describing the same population.

Do you have any proof that would refute the core point?

To play devil's advocate here (I don't personally care one way or another what hispanic people are typically called), I don't think polling sentiment is necessarily a good indicator of something's morality.

For reference, 75% of polled people in the US disapproved of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the year he was assassinated.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...

If we go by your logic of purely going off of polling, MLK, Jr. was an all around terrible man going against the wishes of the population. I don't think any reasonable person these days would agree with that.

Are you implying it's okay to call a class of people a term which they explicitly do not want you to use against them?

What sets this apart from a racial slur apart from a marginal difference in support?

This isn't about how everyone feels but about how the group that this is supposed to represent and name feels about it. It's like someone decided that your name is now Alice. You had no say in it and you don't like the name but you're now Alice. You had a name you called yourself but they didn't care and now you're Alice.

Learning German for the better part of the last two years, I agree with the thought of your comment. The only way I could wrap my head around the notorious German genders is by divorcing myself of the English concept that gender in language depends completely on the object referred to. Rather, I had to see gender as an arbitrary grammatical category; so just get used to it!

However, I (an armchair linguist, I should note) am also a big adherent to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: your language affects your world view. And in terms of gender, there's at least research[1] that shows linguistic gender affects our perception of things. Of course, as with all research, it's open to critique, but I don't have the training for evaluating research in this field. Maybe someone else better equipped could chime in.

Interesting quotes:

> In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a “key” — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like “hard,” “heavy,” “jagged,” “metal,” “serrated,” and “useful,” whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say “golden,” “intricate,” “little,” “lovely,” “shiny,” and “tiny.” ... This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender.

> Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language.

The second quote struck me in particular because when I first came across this, I just had a vacation in Paris where I visited the Pantheon. In one of the Pantheon's pillars is a depiction of Death (French: La Mort, feminine) and it struck me as very curious that in this depiction, Death is female. The only other work I knew of to do that was Neil Gaiman's Sandman.

(This is already long enough, but going back to the topic of "Latinx" terms...I don't intend my point above as an endorsement of this practice. In fact I find them quite virtue signalling. I have more thoughts on this but I think the majority of gender (and racial) activism is distracted on bike shedding issues such as using this "x-form". But enough said for now.)

[1] https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...

> Rather, I had to see gender as an arbitrary grammatical category; so just get used to it!

Exactly

> Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: your language affects your world view

I also agree on this. The study you mentioned about German and Spanish speakers is fascinating.

However I see this under a slightly different light: I suspect that speaking a language where all nouns are gendered, your gender-related biases might end up being de-emphasised over time[1]. I would love to read research papers about this topic.

[1] see my other comments here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710620 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27710812 where I attempt to explain what I mean by that

> your language affects your world view.

It absolutely does. That's why learning new languages can heavily widen one's perspective.

That's also why people who can influence word definitions, especially legal ones, are the most influent and powerful people on earth.

Talking about French, the English word "mortgage" always sounded extremely sinister from a French perspective, given its linguistic implications.

> your language affects your world view

As a linguist, my personal opinion is that it tinges your world view, but does not have a large influence on it. I only adhere to a very light interpretation of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. tldr: culture is a much stronger influence on world view, it also strongly influences language.

A simple, but clear example is rhyme. By having words that rhyme in your language, you are more likely to pair them together in a song or a poem, like love and dove, but these words don't rhyme in Chinese so you a Chinese speaker is less likely to pair them when rhyme is needed. It also affects word play. A counter argument would be imperfect rhyme, the culture or desired effect forces a rhyme on words. The speaker finds a why to manipulate the language for their needs.

A stronger argument argument against Sapir-Whorf is that there are native speakers of a language that have very different cultures like native speaker of American English and native speakers of Indian English. They both speak English, but have very different world views, and change the language to suit their communication needs. The opposite can be true as well, speakers of different languages, but related cultures can shape their languages in similar ways. For example, many Singaporeans are native or high level English speakers and the language has evolved patterns and communication styles found in Chinese languages.

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