“Latinx” is lexical imperialism | Hacker News Reader

“Latinx” is lexical imperialism

newsweek.com

111 pointsleephillips65 comments

> Because accuracy isn't the goal. Proponents of "Latinx" aren't speaking to us or for us. They're speaking through us—to each other. Its use is purely about signaling—not to Latin people, but to other signalers. And beneath the signal, there is hardly anything of substance at all.

This is a bit like (non-native) people stating their location in their Twitter bio as "Salish lands" or "Ohlone lands" in place of Seattle or San Francisco. And yes, I think this extends to cishet people using putting gender pronouns in their name field on Zoom, etc.

If they really want to signal their virtue, they should call themselves AmericXns first before mangling other nationalities.

I can't speak to using "Latinx" or land acknowledgements, but myself and other non-cishet people I know appreciate the normalization of adding pronouns to names/bios by all kinds of people because it helps us feel a lot less othered. I hate being the only one in a Zoom call with my pronouns in my name.

That being said, I know cishet people more often than not do it to signal, but intentions aside, I think it's helpful and I only hope it becomes more common. I'd say about a quarter of my organization does it on Zoom, with almost all of us doing it on Mattermost. It's nice.

whats the percentage of non-cishet in your organization?

~5% is my best guess.

There's a hidden benefit as well: ambiguous names. Like Taylor for instance.

I understand the utility of communicating what pronouns to use, but what I don't understand is why people list multiple forms instead of just one. If you say "they", the "them" and "their" are implied already etc.

I guess because it rolls off the tongue better?

> And yes, I think this extends to cishet people using putting gender pronouns in their name field on Zoom, etc.

Do you have a functional cisdar/gaydar? Mine seems to be broken.

Less flippantly: you don't necessarily know, a priori, what someone's pronouns are just from their name and/or profile on some web service. That's why listing pronouns is, at the absolute minimum, socially useful.

I think it boils down to if its important to you, list them. If its not, leave them off. I’ll never list mine because I cannot think of a time in my life when some one has gotten my pronouns wrong, and even if they did, it would not offend me in the slightest. If anything I would just assume the person misspoke, or if it continued, that they are an idiot or intentionally being an ass.

the main thing is that we keep the political focus on race & gender etc instead of focusing on old fashioned things like progressive taxation, healthcare, worker rights & benefits, etc.

The current progressive focus on race and gender is new, and new is always better.

It's also really amazing at dividing lower/working classes into two groups. Which makes it much harder for them to band together and push for a change in how the country treats the poorest majority.

>the main thing is that we keep the political focus on race & gender

Divide et impera.

This is the biggest win of the 1% in the recent decades. Turning people against each other so they can't eat the rich.

I don't think it was really intentional though.

I'm pretty sure that maximizing user engagement (as social media does) leads to communities with easily defined and large borders. The border between rich and poor might be easily defined, but it isn't so large as to have a constant flow of anecdotes. The borders between races or genders are much more "daily life."

And -- ultimately -- I don't think the rich are that different of humans either. I see the issue as system level, some flaw in design which makes inequalities and differences grow rather than taper out.

They're not mutually exclusive. I would like a more progressive tax system, better healthcare for everyone, better rights for workers, and better systemic treatment of minorities and non-binary people.

what are 'binary people', and should they be offended by a term that implies that they only come in two kinds?

"Binary people" means "women and men".

What percent of the population is that...99.6%?

This is an excellent point that I hadn't properly considered before. The term "non-binary" invokes a strawman that it proceeds to tear down. The notion is if you don't accept the idea that gender is an arbitrary social construction, you must therefore believe people fall into rigid, simplistic categories.

The common quip is always "we can do both".

I don't really see us doing both though. We keep yelling about identity politics and one side keeps evolving to the point where 50% of the people are basically on the same page about an ever increasing list of concerns around minorities, while the other side is ever more entrenched in opposition -- meanwhile the social policies that 80% of the people would agree upon (like if you poll about universal healthcare by describing it instead of naming it) are simply not happening.

This is unlikely to be an accident since the corporations who have bought most of the politicians in the country don't mind more minority CEOs but they're very threatened by economic policies that would be overwhelmingly popular if an imaginary labor-oriented political party were able to punch through the corporate propaganda.

I completely agree with you, with the qualifier that the article is very much part of the problem. These sort of issues always start small and then the media picks them up and splashes them on the front page purely as outrage bait.

I have absolutely no reason to care about this issue. I'll bet 99% of the people reading the article have absolutely no reason to care. I don't care if I see Latin(o|a|x) on a form, if I was creating a form and someone asked me to include Latinx I'd say 'sure, why not'. This is an artificial culture war created by a click happy media.

> I'll bet 99% of the people reading the article have absolutely no reason to care.

but the article says

>while 40 percent [of Hispanics] found it offensive.

The author's numbers are questionable. The study is linked - 800 participants, the actual question

> Does the use of the term LatinX to describe the Hispanic or Latina(o) community bother or offend you?

I'd say there's a difference between "bother or offend" and "found offensive". Breaking it down further

> 20% "Yes, a lot" > 11%, "Yes, somewhat" > 9%, "Yes a little"

20% 'a little or somewhat bothered' is a lot different than 20% offended

If we trust Wikipedia that Latinos are 18% of the US population and 20% of that population is "a lot" offended by Latinx, we get down to 3%. I'll grant that I was incorrect in my 99% assumption, but 97% isn't much better.

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000017d-81be-dee4-a5ff-efbe7...

So the author’s claim is correct, that 40% of the population that the slur claims to refer to find it offensive. Although some of that 40% just found it "somewhat" or "a little" offensive.

20% said it bothered them, somewhat or a little. I find "bothered" much milder than "offensive"

The issue with the 97% percent you arrived at is the implicit assumption that only people from the US read the article.

Are we really arguing over the validity of a brand new activist word coined to describe a culture where some reasonable percentage of said culture find it bothersome/offensive, and is likely never going to used by 97% of the culture because the predominant language they use is grammatically gendered?

This to me smacks of elitism and making the intention more important than the effect.

> The current progressive focus on race and gender is new, and new is always better.

My feeling here is that these issues are not as pressing to progressives as conservatives think they are. Not surprisingly on this site, I only see these topics brought up from the conservative "anti-woke" perspective.

OP's submission history shows a pretty clear theme with these type of articles. I think an occasional discussion is fine but some users here insist on carrying out some sort of culture war here.

From the guidelines:

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

"Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."

As the OP, I prefer my discussions to be mostly free of ad hominem.

If you don’t see why the topic is interesting and is a new angle on a new (“latinx” is quite new) phenomenon, there is little effort required to simply move on.

In the past 10 days I’ve submitted links about mathematics, computer science, the Defense Dept, physics, and libraries. But this is the one you decided to drop in on and complain about.

I prefer to use the grammatically correct and gender neutral latine/latines. That term seems to be embraced by Mexicans. Julieta Venegas is a proponent so is the show House of Flowers on Netflix. LatinX is just really awkward to say and doesn’t roll off the tongue in Spanish.

Exactly this! I think non-gendered adjectives are a nice addition to Spanish and many people are starting to use it! Adding "-e" to the end of words is far more commy tham adding x to it. Latinx sounda really weird in Spanish and latine sounda way better, it also integrates netter with other parts of the language, you can say ingeniere, aliade, but ingenierx or aliadx sounds amd looks weird and ugly.

I'm guessing Spanish doesn't have this because it doesn't do noun declination as much, but Latin does have the concept of a "common" grammatical gender that is distinct from the neuter, for words that apply to people or animals but that aren't specifically masculine or feminine.

>I prefer to use the grammatically correct and gender neutral latine/latines.

As a Spanish speaker, can you explain to me why latine/latines is grammatically correct? Or are you trying to say it's grammatically correct in the language of the people trying to force it onto Spanish speakers?

I wasn't aware "latine" was being used in Spanish.

Out of curiosity, how do you decide how other words agree with it, like la/el and adjective endings?

I get that "Hispanic" is a bad term (hello Brazil, which has nothing to do with Spain or the Spanish language) and that Latino/Latina is gendered and that in real conversation, when someone has origins in Southern America and is still in touch with that culture they'll eventually say something akin to "I'm Peruvian American" which gives me much more context (almost as if you couldn't reduce the culture and heritage of a whole continent to a single term).

But would the term "Latin" be acceptable. As in Latin-America?

It is acceptable, and a perfectly fine term, as far as it goes, as the OA says.

Latin is fine, but the plural "Latins" is awkward

Edit: Maybe it should be "Latini"

> (hello Brazil, which has nothing to do with Spain or the Spanish language)

Heh, that's good, because Portugal is part of "Hispania" since forever.

Hispanic in proper terms it's related to Spain and Portugal, for any romance (Catalan, Castillian or Galician) or Basque spoken in the peninsula, not just to Spain and/or Castillian speakers.

So Brazil is actually as Hispanic as Argentina.

Blame Castille for appropiating themselves the term Hispania/Spain since the Middle Ages.

I didn't know that. Thanks!

https://wikiless.org/wiki/Hispania?lang=en

EDIT:

Also, from Camões:

"Falai de castelhanos e de portugueses, porque espanhóis somos todos"

Y'all talk of (the) Castillian and Portuguese (people), as we are all Spanish.

It may be imperialism, but it's a failed attempt. I only spend my outrage on successful injustice.

Someone with common sense at least.

"Latin" in English works perfectly for any gender since forever.

Yes, I’ve wondered why the wokesters didn’t use that, or the alternative latine. But this author explains it well: they use latinx to signal to each other; existing, working words don’t accomplish that.

I've heard Latine used.

cf. https://tulanehullabaloo.com/57213/intersections/opinion-lat...

If you had a time machine and could rewrite the last few years of history such that "latin" took the place of "latinx", this opinion piece would be titled '"Latin" is lexical imperialism'. The "x" itself isn't the issue at hand, but rather that people feel they've been pressured to change how they identify in order to satisfy the goals of people wanting to promote the use of gender-inclusive language. There's no easy fix for that broader issue (which reads to me like a problem of building consensus around norms in society).

I am from Spain, so I know really well any hispanic culture, at least on idiomatic terms. Here people doesn't give a crap on "gendered" language, because when you say "La silla" you don't assume it's "femenine", it's just a convenience.

It's entirely possible for someone experiencing racism to be sexist. It's entirely possible for someone being oppressed from outside their community to be privileged within it. It's entirely possible for for someone to have one set of unwanted backward views that negatively affect them, while holding on to a different set of backward views that benefit them.

It's also almost always true that one person does not speak for everyone they claim to represent.

There is rarely an objectively correct position when it comes to race, gender, and identity. I don't see this conversation as being an exception.

I sincerely do not intend this observation to be overtly political, BUT I've often wondered about certain very progressive movements having their logical extremes come into conflict. In the US, there's been a movement to remove gender from aspects of language (example, preferring police officer over policeman, business person over businessman). I personally don't really care and re-examining a variety of norms and phrases for entrenched bias makes some sense to me.

Romance languages have gender much more deeply ingrained in the language and present far more challenges in attempting to de-gender them. So, if the progressive attempts to respect the culture of others and be welcoming to different cultures, that can come into conflict with attempting to remove implicit bias that may (or may not) be connected with language (with the claim being that saying businessman inherently discourages non males from pursuing business).

Disclaimer: I'm not very political and align myself largely with moderate democrats with some libertarian sympathies at time. I have nothing against the ideals of re-examining previously held notions for pursuits of greater equality, just an interesting conflict in my opinion with political relevance. I find it fascinating that Trump improved margins with Hispanic voters over past Republicans and I find myself wondering if it wasn't so much about him as aspects of the progressive/democratic movement.

As a Latino: it's bullshit. I'm willing to accept the changes you do to your English, it's completely fine, your language your rules.

Trying to change my language is a no-no, in my opinion, and feel dehumanizing, as if my culture isn't "progressive" enough and had to be changed.

The original Latinx idea came from Latino/a non-binary people. The -x suffix is also being pushed in some Latin American countries, like Argentina, by a minority.

Also note that Latino is an American English word now, and it makes sense that it'd evolve on its own independent of the original word in Spanish.

I'd be fine with saying just, "The Latins."

Sounds reasonable.

But wait. What happens if a Latino/Latina does this, since then it would be their language too? Is the claim that everyone pushing Latinx is non-Latin?

There are movements afoot in German and French to reduce (long term remove) gender from the language. This isn't just a phenomenon occuring at the conjunction of Spanish and the US.

> Is the claim that everyone pushing Latinx is non-Latin?

As far as I can tell, that is exactly what the article claims - that Latinx was invented by and is being pushed by signallers only, and mostly non-Latin ones.

As far as I can tell from reading it, that claim is not made in the article [replying to your comment before you edited it].

Yup, sorry. Edited for precision.

So you're fine with latinx as long as we're writing in English?

It's not an English word, so yeah, kinda. I use "singular they" nowadays, but I'll not speak "gender neutral Portuguese" because English people want me to.

Could you give more examples of this effort to "remove gender" from language? Both the examples you give, I think, are not replacing words, just preferring more ambiguous words that don't assume a gender. I don't think these things should be political or really all that controversial. The examples you give also do (edit) NOT parallel the same issue with grammatical gender in another language, as we are simply talking about two or three different nouns, not their noun class.

Hispanic is usually a good choice in these matters.

On what do you base that statement? In my experience, many people make a pretty sharp distinction between Hispanic (being about the linguistic aspect of culture) vs Latin (being about the geographic aspect - from "Latin America"). For example, contrast Spain vs. Brazil. Treating the two as synonyms is as fraught as "Latinx" is.

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