Talk:Latinx

Similar terms

Also recently seen: womxn and hxstory for woman/women and history. Equinox ◑ 20:47, 13 June 2016 (UTC)

I guess "womyn" was too pronounceable? :-p - -sche (discuss) 10:48, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

This US university [1] has a page for its "alumnx" (even though we already have a gender-neutral word for those). Equinox ◑ 00:03, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

Well, that's for the Critical Gender Studies department. They seem like the most active in making coinages like this. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:13, 15 May 2018 (UTC)

As an aside, searching for alumnx is made difficult by how often it's a scanno of alumnæ. (Also, for posterity, some discussion of this suffix?/element is at Wiktionary:Tea room/2019/March#-x_(or_-x-)_as_an_general_inclusive_affix?.) - -sche (discuss) 21:05, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

Here's another interesting one: Xicana (as in Xicana literature), where the gender-neutral X replaces not the gendered suffix, which is left alone, but instead the first letters of the word. - -sche (discuss) 15:24, 4 June 2018 (UTC)

I think I'll list any other examples of this that I find at Talk:x, now that there is a relevant sense at x. - -sche (discuss) 01:23, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Here's a SeFija interview with Stephanie Beatriz in which she pronounces the word (in the way our entry mentions) twice between 10:27 and 10:56. - -sche (discuss) 20:07, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

I have also heard this pronounced by some people as /ˈlæt.ɪn.ˌɛks/. In fact, googling around, I found clips of enough people doing that in just this one NBC News piece that I'm going to add it, although it may be substandard? - -sche (discuss) 19:45, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

Needs citation?

Not sure wiktionary's current policies on this, but:

The term is not generally liked by people with a Latin American background, with some considering it linguistic imperialism.

This seems like the sort of point that should be backed up with a reference to something. Jun-Dai (talk) 15:11, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Not really the kind that "should" be backed up with a reference (the statement accurately reflects current realities around the term), but some reference is a good thing to have so I've added one for the first half. People can easily google op-eds calling Latinx "linguistic imperialism", there's imo no need to link to diatribes. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 15:13, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

this site suggests the trend originated with a Spanish language podcast, but it seems to have completely disappeared from the Internet unless Arenal is a typo for Arsenal. —Soap— 19:11, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

Whoops I misread but I still cant find the actual podcast on the page so I'm going to let this lie for now. Either https://www.latinousa.org/2016/01/29/latinx-ungendering-spanish-language/ no longer contains the audio or Im just not seeing it on the page. —Soap— 19:13, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

I keep meaning to make time to flesh this out, and will eventually... - -sche (discuss) 23:06, 5 July 2020 (UTC)

OK, I finally fleshed out more on who uses vs disuses the term, and why. Too much (and misleading) emphasis was being given to one single tiny poll which found that speakers selected other words as their primary identification, which someone here had (probably in good faith) followed right-wing outlets in spinning as if 98% of speakers actively objected to the term. (I particularly liked the line in the one article that, because of the margin of error in the poll, the real number of people using this term could be "-5%", which is definitely mathematically possible... 😂) - -sche (discuss) 19:12, 30 July 2020 (UTC)

@-sche The usage note was not influenced by hard-right 'media' and it clearly did not state anything like "98% of speakers actively objected" to Latinx. I don't think it was wrong to use the poll, but it is indeed very small. This by Pew Forum is a better reference and should probably replace it. Among many other things they note that it is mostly used by young Latin American women (strangely they don't include nonbinary people, not even as a special sample).

That line in the Remezcla article was silly and unprofessional (and mathematically incorrect, 2 - 5 = -3, not -5), but probably a joke; the tone of the article isn't very serious. The links to those Remezcla articles can be removed as well though, the Pew report is much better (they also have another item about Latinx). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 15:40, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it was necessarily wrong to use the small poll either, and it's apparently in line with the Pew poll as far as how many people primarily use the term, though as Pew partly acknowledges by covering the larger number who've heard of it and the even larger number who haven't heard of it and so couldn't be expected to have an opinion on it, there's a difference between something not being the primary term someone uses, and them not liking it. As Remezcla gets at, right-wing (including non-Hispanic and non-Spanish-speaking) folks have been treating low numbers of people who use it as their primary term as high numbers of people who dislike or object to it. There's also a difference between English-speakers in the US (including, anecdotally, nonbinary, nonbinary, nonbinary, or otherwise LGBT ones—and yes, most of those were published on left-wing sites) describing themselves with Latinx in English, and Spanish-speakers outside the US objecting to the use of latinx as hard to pronounce in Spanish. But we should certainly revise the notes to indicate that the number of users is small. (Btw, how unsurprising that men don't use it... I wonder why men wouldn't see a problem with continuing to use the male form Latino as the default... lol.) Are there other changes that should be made? - -sche (discuss) 18:09, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Belated note that this LA Times piece and some of the online discussion around it finally touched on something missing from much of the other reporting, which I pointed out above, which is: it's unsurprising conservative Latino men or women wouldn't see a problem with Latino and wouldn't use a non-binary-coined / non-binary-inclusive neologism, you can say the same about conservative white men or women and such things, it's bog-standard binarism, and while we can and should use the various references to report how rare the term is (and that many men/women don't like it, and so on), the angle some people have taken that it's offensive to Latinos just come across like the "don't say 'pregnant people', it's misogynistic to include women as people!" bellyaching, it misses the dynamic of who it's for vs who's mad. - -sche (discuss) 20:55, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

In the New York Times this week

11 June, they use the word but immediately explain it: "Politicians — including the City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — celebrities and L.G.B.T. leaders said Ms. Polanco’s death highlighted how the criminal justice system continually victimizes transgender women, particularly those of color, like Ms. Polanco, who was Latinx. (Latinx is a gender-neutral alternative to Latino or Latina.)" [2] Equinox ◑ 09:03, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

To add to entry

To add to this entry: the first recorded usages of this term. 2015 is too late by at least a decade. 173.88.246.138 22:56, 11 July 2021 (UTC)

If you can find it, add it. I've seen claims that use of x in this way in various words goes back to the 1980s or earlier among activists in Spanish-speaking countries, e.g. on posters or graffiti, but it's hard to find examples since many such things aren't digitized and among digitized texts the occurrence of it as an OCR error in texts from that period makes searching difficult, so we're left with what we've got. - -sche (discuss) 20:56, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

Comparable to a slur, according to some people.

According to some Latinos, this word is a slur, and the worst anti-Latino one as well. CitationsFreak (talk) 06:03, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

There are many folks that use it as well; without getting into the politics and history of the term and why folks might see it that way, I think our current labels are enough. AG202 (talk) 13:33, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

It does amuse(?) me that conservatives have decided to call everything they dislike a slur. (And it's often outsiders doing it, e.g. it's usually non-Hispanic conservatives in the US who are banning Latinx.) But even Hispanic men and women not liking that nonbinary Hispanic people coined and now have a term to describe themselves is...well, that, and we should acknowledge that: it's (relatively conservative) men and women engaging in binarism, not (or at least clearly not only), as they try to present it, them somehow being victimized by non-binary Hispanics. (See also my comment of 4 August 2022 above.) - -sche (discuss) 19:50, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I've seen a tweet that started with "As a non-binary Latino,". (Also, the "Latinx is a slur" thing comes out when a corporation says something like "We honor Latinx History Month".) CitationsFreak (talk) 20:44, 3 October 2023 (UTC)