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https://www.rae.es/ does Not recognize the term in Spanish language
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{{wiktionary|Latinx}}
{{wiktionary|Latinx}}
'''''Latinx''''' is a [[Gender neutrality|gender-neutral]] [[neologism]], sometimes used instead of [[Latino (demonym)|''Latino'' or ''Latina'']] to refer to people of [[Latin American]] cultural or ethnic identity in the [[United States]]. The {{angbr|-x}} suffix replaces the standard {{angbr|-o/-a}} ending of nouns and adjectives that are typical of [[grammatical gender in Spanish]]. Its plural is ''Latinxs''.
'''''Latinx''''' is a [[Gender neutrality|gender-neutral]] [[neologism]], sometimes used instead of [[Latino (demonym)|''Latino'' or ''Latina'']] to refer to people of [[Latin American]] cultural or ethnic identity in the [[United States]]. The {{angbr|-x}} suffix replaces the standard {{angbr|-o/-a}} ending of nouns and adjectives that are typical of [[grammatical gender in Spanish]]. Its plural is ''Latinxs''.

Real Academia Española does not recognize the term (Latinx) in the spainsh language :<nowiki>https://www.rae.es/</nowiki>


The term was first seen online around 2004. It has later been used in [[social media]] by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for individuals living on [[Genderqueer|the borderlines of gender identity]]. The term became widespread in US universities by 2014. Words used for similar purposes include ''[[Chicanx]]'', '''''Latin@''''' and '''''Latine'''''.
The term was first seen online around 2004. It has later been used in [[social media]] by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for individuals living on [[Genderqueer|the borderlines of gender identity]]. The term became widespread in US universities by 2014. Words used for similar purposes include ''[[Chicanx]]'', '''''Latin@''''' and '''''Latine'''''.

Revision as of 17:52, 6 July 2020

"Latina/o", "Latine", and "Mexicanx" redirect here. For the sailing vessel, see Lateen. For the people of Mexico, see Mexicans. For other uses, see Latin (disambiguation), Latina (disambiguation), and Latino (disambiguation).
Look up Latinx in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Latinx is a gender-neutral neologism, sometimes used instead of Latino or Latina to refer to people of Latin American cultural or ethnic identity in the United States. The ⟨-x⟩ suffix replaces the standard ⟨-o/-a⟩ ending of nouns and adjectives that are typical of grammatical gender in Spanish. Its plural is Latinxs.

Real Academia Española does not recognize the term (Latinx) in the spainsh language :https://www.rae.es/

The term was first seen online around 2004. It has later been used in social media by activists, students, and academics who seek to advocate for individuals living on the borderlines of gender identity. The term became widespread in US universities by 2014. Words used for similar purposes include Chicanx, Latin@ and Latine.

Reactions to the term have been mixed. Supporters say it engenders greater acceptance among non-binary Latinos. Critics say the term is ungrammatical and disrespectful toward the Spanish language. Both supporters and detractors point to linguistic imperialism as a reason for respectively supporting or opposing the use of the term. A 2019 poll found that 98% of Hispanic and Latino Americans prefer other terms.[1] The Royal Spanish Academy does not recognize the use of -x in its Spanish language style guide.[2]

People of Latin America descent have various terms to self-identify, and as a rejection of the term Latinx's elitism and anglo-centricity, other terms have been used including: Latina/o, Latin@, Latin American, Latiné, Latinu, Latini, and the standard Latina and Latino. [3] To capture the complexity of the various terms used the term Latin* (pronounced Latin) was introduced in 2020[3].

Pronunciation

Pronunciations included in dictionaries are /ləˈtiːnɛks, læ-, lɑː-, -nəks, ˈlætɪnɛks/ lə-TEE-neks, la(h)-, -⁠nəks, LAT-in-eks.[4][5][6][7] Other variants respelled ad hoc as "latins" and "latinks" have also been reported to be in use.[8] Editors at Merriam-Webster surmised that "there was little consideration for how it was supposed to be pronounced when it was created".[9]

Group identity

Latinx is a group identity used exclusively in the United States. The social category is also referred to by other names, including Hispanic, Latino, Latina/o, and Latin@. In the 2000s, the social category of Latinos was analyzed in one of three ways, as ethnoracial, as a cultural ethnic group, or as familial-historical.[10]

The ethnoracial approach is contextual, highlighting the analyses that Latinos come from a variety of different races, and from different parts of Latin America, which span all the standard US racial categories. This is the approach taken by Linda Martín Alcoff. What Latinx means in a particular ethnoracial context depends on the region one is in and the provenance of the population - from one or another Latin American country or group of countries - Cubans, Mexicans, and so on. Because of this variability and complexity, Alcoff refers to Latinos as an ethnorace as, depending on context, Latinos function sometimes as an ethnic group, and sometimes as a racial group.[10]

History

Origins and early usage

The term Latinx emerged from American Spanish in the early 21st century,[11] and was reportedly first used online in 2004.[12] The term has gained popularity in social media, and is mostly used by community activists and in higher education settings by students, faculty, staff, and some administrators who seek to advocate for individuals living on the borderlines of gender identity.[13]

The term emerged in response "to circumstances in which existent language structures fail to articulate value in appropriate ways."[14][15]

LGBTQ+

Salinas and Lozano (2017) stated that the term is influenced by Mexican indigenous communities that have a third gender role, such as Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca (see also: Gender system § Juchitán, Oaxaca, Mexico).[13]

Generational

The term often refers specifically to LGBT people or to young people. Brian Latimer, a producer at MSNBC who identifies as nonbinary, says that the application of the term "shows a generational divide in the Hispanic community".[16]: 60  A 2016 college article said that the term "has been sweeping across college campuses."[17]

Public awareness

The term Latinx grew in usage since its origins, and came into popular use in late 2014.[18]

Many people became more aware of the term in the month following the Orlando nightclub shooting of June 2016; Google Trends shows that searches for this term rose greatly in this period.[16]: 60 

A 2016 NBC News report noted that it was "difficult to pinpoint" the origins of the term, but found that usage was "without question on the rise at U.S. colleges".[19] A similar use of 'x' in the term Mx. may have been an influence or model for the development of Latinx.[20]

At Princeton University, a student group called the Princeton University Latinx Perspective Organization was founded in 2016 to "unify Princeton's diverse Latinx community".[21] As of 2017, several student-run organizations at other institutions have utilized the word in their title.[22]

In 2016, the term appeared in the titles of academic books in the context of LGBT studies,[23] rhetoric and composition studies,[24] and comics studies.[25]

On June 26, 2019, during the first 2020 Democratic Party presidential debate, the word was used by the presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren,[26] which USA Today called "one of the highest profile uses of the term since its conception".[27]

A 2019 poll found that only 2% of US residents of Latin American descent preferred to use Latinx, including only 3% of 18-34-year-olds.[28][1]

A 2020 study based on interviews with 34 Latinx/a/o students from the US found that they "perceive higher education as a privileged space where they use the term Latinx. Once they return to their communities, they do not use the term."[3]

In literature and academia

Scharrón-del Río and Aja (2015) have traced the use of Latinx in authors Beatriz Llenín Figueroa, Jaime Géliga Quiñones, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Adriana Gallegos Dextre.[29] The term has also been discussed in publications by Pastrana, Battle & Harris (2016),[23] Valdes (2017),[30][31] and many others.[32]

A 2020 analysis found "that community college professional organizations have by and large not adopted the term Latinx, even by organizations with a Latinx/a/o centered mission", although some academic journals and dissertations about community colleges were using it.[33]

Reception

Sign at the Women's March on Washington. The sign reads, "women's, LGBTQIA, immigrant's, black, Latinx, Muslim, & disability rights are human rights".

While Latinx has been called "a recognition of the exclusionary nature of our institutions, of the deficiencies in existent linguistic structures, and of language as an agent of social change,"[34] the term has also been the subject of controversy. Supporters say it engenders greater acceptance among non-binary gender Latinos. Linguistic imperialism has been used both as a basis of criticism, and of support. The term has been criticized by some lexicographers and rejected from some dictionaries on grammatical grounds,[27][2] and accepted by others.[35] Some have argued that the term supports patriarchal bias, is antifeminist, based on political correctness, or criticized it because it is difficult to pronounce.

The Royal Spanish Academy, the main authority on the Spanish language, issued a style manual in 2018 which rejects the use of -x and -e as gender-neutral alternatives to the collective masculine -o ending.[27][2] Some refuse to use the term, as Latinx is difficult to pronounce in the Spanish language.[36]

By 2019, linguist John McWhorter observed that usage of Latinx had not caught on, contrasting it with the success of other neologisms such as African American (in the 1980s) or the singular they.[1] He argued that this was because "Latinx may solve a problem [i.e. that of implied gender], but it’s not a problem that people who are not academics or activists seem to find as urgent as they do."[1]

Criticism

The term Latinx has been criticized for being used almost exclusively in the United States and for being virtually non-existent in Spanish-speaking countries.[18] A 2016 HuffPost article stated, "Many opponents of the term have suggested that using an un-gendered noun like Latinx is disrespectful to the Spanish language and some have even called the term 'a blatant form of linguistic imperialism.'"[36][18] In a 2017 article for the Los Angeles Times, Daniel Hernandez wrote "The term is used mostly by an educated minority, largely in the U.S."[37]

Another argument against Latinx is that "it erases feminist movements in the 1970s" that fought for use of the word Latina to represent women.[27]

Hector Luis Alamo described the term as a "bulldozing of Spanish".[16] In a 2015 article for Latino Rebels, Alamo wrote: "If we dump Latino for Latinx because it offends some people, then we should go on dumping words forever since there will always be some people who find some words offensive.[38]

Nicole Trujillo-Pagán has argued that patriarchal bias is reproduced in ostensibly "gender neutral" language[39][40][41] and asserted, "Less clear in the debate (as it has developed since then) is how the replacement silences and erases long-standing struggles to recognize the significance of gender difference and sexual violence."[42]

Support

The term Latinx allows those who do not identify within the gender binary to be seen and accepted by getting rid of the gendered ending of Latina/o, said Yara Simón in Remezcla.[43] In Spanish and in English, the suffix "x has grown into the linguistic vacuum created by a culture that values inclusivity over the ideologies embedded in a and o."[44] Some commentators, such as Ed Morales, a lecturer at Columbia University and author of the 2018 book Latinx: The New Force in American Politics and Culture, associate the term with the ideas of Gloria Anzaldúa, a Chicana feminist. Morales writes that "refusal to conform to male/female gender binaries" parallels "the refusal to conform to a racial binary".[16]: 61  Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera argues that "The gesture toward linguistic intersectionality stems from a suffix endowed with a literal intersection — x."[45]

Defending usage of the term against critics arguing linguistic imperialism, Brooklyn College professors María R. Scharrón-del Río and Alan A. Aja argued that the Spanish language itself is a form of linguistic imperialism for Latin Americans.[29][36]

The term Latinx was added to the Merriam-Webster English dictionary[35] in 2018, as it continued to grow in popularity.[27]

Similar terms

See also: Gender neutrality in Spanish

Similar gender-neutral forms have also arisen. One such term is Latin@,[46][29] which combines the written form of the ⟨-a⟩ and ⟨-o⟩ endings and has been in use since the 1990s.[citation needed] Similar terms include Chicanx[47] and the variant spelling Xicanx.[48]

Latine (plural: Latines) is another gender-neutral term that has found less acceptance than Latinx.[46] It arose out of genderqueer speakers' use of the ending -e; similar forms include amigue ('friend') and elle (singular 'they').[49]

Latin* (pronounced Latin) can consider Latinx, Latiné, Latini, Latinu, Latino, Latina, Latina/o, Latin@, Latin, or Latin American.[3]

See also

References

Works cited

  • Vargas, Manuel (2018). "Latinx Philosophy". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. ISSN 1095-5054. OCLC 643092515. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b c d McWhorter, John (December 23, 2019). "Why Latinx Can't Catch On". The Atlantic. Retrieved May 27, 2020.
  2. ^ a b c Cataño, Adriana (November 28, 2018). "The RAE Has Made Its Decision About Latinx and Latine in Its First Style Manual". Remezcla.
  3. ^ a b c d Salinas, Cristobal (January 12, 2020). "The Complexity of the "x" in Latinx : How Latinx/a/o Students Relate to, Identify With, and Understand the Term Latinx". Journal of Hispanic Higher Education. 19 (2): 149–168. doi:10.1177/1538192719900382. ISSN 1538-1927.
  4. ^ "Latinx". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.
  5. ^ "Latinx". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. n.d. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  6. ^ "Latinx". Dictionary.com Unabridged (Online). n.d. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  7. ^ "Latinx". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.). HarperCollins. Retrieved December 8, 2019.
  8. ^ Stavans, Ilan. "El significado del 'latinx'". New York Times. Retrieved July 31, 2019.
  9. ^ "'Latinx' And Gender Inclusivity: How do you pronounce this more inclusive word?". Merriam-Webster. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, Inc. September 2018. Retrieved August 29, 2019.
  10. ^ a b Vargas 2018, 1.1 Group Identity.
  11. ^ "Latinx". Oxford Dictionaries UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. n.d. Retrieved May 4, 2018.
  12. ^ Gamio Cuervo, Arlene B. (August 2016). "Latinx: A Brief Guidebook". Academia.edu. Princeton LGBT Center.
  13. ^ a b Salinas, Cristobal; Lozano, Adele (November 16, 2017). "Mapping and recontextualizing the evolution of the term Latinx: An environmental scanning in higher education". Journal of Latinos and Education. 18 (4): 302–315. doi:10.1080/15348431.2017.1390464.
  14. ^ Herlihy-Mera, Jeffrey. "The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of 'Latinx | Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved August 21, 2019.
  15. ^ "The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of 'Latinx".
  16. ^ a b c d Brammer, John Paul (May 2019). "Generation X: Digging Into the Messy History of 'Latinx' Helped Me Embrace My Complex Identity". Mother Jones. Vol. 44, no. 3. pp. 59–61.
  17. ^ Magtoto, Mica (March 9, 2016). "Latinx: A case for inclusion or segregation?". Iowa State Daily. Ames, Iowa. Retrieved August 6, 2019. The term Latinx has been sweeping across college campuses in the nation with the intent of creating inclusion while inadvertently pitting members of the Latino community into a cultural war.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  18. ^ a b c Guerra, Gilbert; Orbea, Gilbert (November 19, 2015). "The argument against the use of the term 'Latinx'". The Phoenix. Retrieved July 1, 2019. This is a blatant form of linguistic imperialism – the forcing of U.S. ideals upon a language in a way that does not grammatically or orally correspond with it.
  19. ^ Reyes, Raul A. (September 29, 2016). "Are you Latinx? As Usage Grows, Word Draws Approval, Criticism". NBC News. Retrieved May 4, 2018.
  20. ^ "'Latinx' And Gender Inclusivity How do you pronounce this more inclusive word?". Merriam Webster. 2017. Archived from the original on August 3, 2017. Retrieved August 2, 2019. A similar use of "x" is in Mx., a gender-neutral title of courtesy that is used in place of gendered titles, such as Mr. and Ms. It has been suggested that the use of "x" in Mx. influenced Latinx.
  21. ^ "Home". Princeton University Latinx Perspectives Organization. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
  22. ^ "Student Organizations | UNC Latina/o Studies Program". lsp.unc.edu. Retrieved April 23, 2017. "Iowa State University – Student Organizations". stuorg.iastate.edu. Retrieved April 23, 2017. "Latinx Student Organizations | Multicultural Resource Center". new.oberlin.edu. Oberlin College. October 24, 2016. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
  23. ^ a b Pastrana, Jr., Antonio (Jay); Battle, Juan; Harris, Angelique (December 22, 2016). An Examination of Latinx LGBT Populations Across the United States: Intersections of Race and Sexuality. Palgrave Pivot. Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-56074-2. ISBN 9781137560742. OCLC 974040623.
  24. ^ Ruiz, Iris D.; Sánchez, Raúl, eds. (October 15, 2016). Decolonizing Rhetoric and Composition Studies: New Latinx Keywords for Theory and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-52724-0. ISBN 9781137527233. OCLC 934502504.
  25. ^ Aldama, Frederick Luis (2016). Latinx Comic Book Storytelling: An Odyssey by Interview. San Diego, CA: ¡Hyperbole Books!, a San Diego State University Press imprint. ISBN 978-1938537929. OCLC 973339575.
  26. ^ Weinberg, Abigail (June 26, 2019). "The First Question of the Democratic Debate was a Challenge to Elizabeth Warren. She Didn't Back Down". Mother Jones. Retrieved June 29, 2019.
  27. ^ a b c d e Rodriguez, Adrianna (June 29, 2019). "'Latinx' explained: A history of the controversial word and how to pronounce it". USA Today. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  28. ^ "What's the Deal With 'Latinx'?". Fortune.
  29. ^ a b c Scharrón-del Río, María R.; Aja, Alan A. (December 5, 2015). "The Case for 'Latinx': Why Intersectionality Is Not a Choice". Latino Rebels.
  30. ^ Valdés, Vanessa K. (March 15, 2017). Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 9781438465159. OCLC 961828672.
  31. ^ Johnson, Jessica Marie (December 12, 2015). "Thinking About the 'X'". Black Perspectives. AAIHS. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
  32. ^ "Results for 'latinx' – 'Book'". WorldCat. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
  33. ^ Salinas, Cristobal; Doran, Erin E.; Swingle, Ethan C. (2020). "Community Colleges' Use of the Term "Latinx"". New Directions for Community Colleges. 2020 (190): 9–20. doi:10.1002/cc.20383. ISSN 0194-3081.
  34. ^ "The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of 'Latinx".
  35. ^ a b "Latinx". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.
  36. ^ a b c Ramirez, Tanisha Love; Blay, Zeba (July 5, 2016). "Why People Are Using The Term 'Latinx'". HuffPost. Retrieved November 15, 2017.
  37. ^ Hernandez, Daniel (December 17, 2017). "The case against 'Latinx'". Los Angeles Times.
  38. ^ Luis Alamo, Hector (December 12, 2015). "The X-ing of Language: The Case Against 'Latinx'". Latino Rebels.
  39. ^ Gastil, John (December 1990). "Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of masculine generics". Sex Roles. 23 (11–12): 629–643. doi:10.1007/BF00289252.
  40. ^ Sniezek, Janet A.; Jazwinski, Christine H. (October 1986). "Gender bias in English: In search of fair language". Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 16 (7): 642–662. doi:10.1111/j.1559-1816.1986.tb01165.x.
  41. ^ Prewitt-Freilino, Jennifer L.; Caswell, T. Andrew; Laakso, Emmi K. (February 2012). "The gendering of language: A comparison of gender equality in countries with gendered, natural gender, and genderless languages". Sex Roles. 66 (3–4): 268–281. doi:10.1007/s11199-011-0083-5.
  42. ^ Trujillo-Pagán, Nicole (February 27, 2018). "No Shock or Awe About 'Acting' Latinx". Latino Rebels. Retrieved July 29, 2018.
  43. ^ Simón, Yara (September 14, 2018). "Hispanic vs. Latino vs. Latinx: A Brief History of How These Words Originated". Remezcla. Retrieved April 3, 2019.
  44. ^ "The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of 'Latinx".
  45. ^ "The Cross-Lingual Interse(x)tionality of 'Latinx".
  46. ^ a b Vidal-Ortiz, Salvador; Martínez, Juliana (2018). "Latinx thoughts: Latinidad with an X" (PDF). Latino Studies. 16 (3): 384–395. doi:10.1057/s41276-018-0137-8. Terms like Latin@, Latine, and LatinU have been deployed—with less traction—to mobilize Latina/o communities
  47. ^ Cashman, Holly (2018). Queer, Latinx, and Bilingual: Narrative Resources in the Negotiation of Identities. Routledge. Introduction; Note 1. ISBN 978-0-415-73909-2. Similarly, Latinx, Chicanx [...] along with many other terms, are all used to describe the ethnolinguistic community.
  48. ^ Noriega, Christine (February 16, 2017). "'We Are Still Here' is a Gorgeous Book Capturing the Queer-Inclusive Evolution of East LA's Chicanx Identity". Remezcla. [T]he Xicanx identity [is] a relatively new term some Mexican-Americans have claimed that stems from the grassroots and working-class roots of the 1960s Chicano movement, but also incorporates indigenous consciousness, feminism, and queer theory in its politics.
  49. ^ Papadopoulos, Benjamin (2019). Morphological Gender Innovations in Spanish of Genderqueer Speakers (Thesis). University of California, Berkeley. p. 3.

Further reading

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Latinx&oldid=966363012"