One example: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/11/901398248...
3% of US Latino adults use the term "Latinx". 20% do not use it, and 76% have never heard of it. Anecdotally, in Latin American countries, most people either mock it or have never heard of it.
But this doesn't stop anglophone woke activists from trying to impose this word on Latinos.
Latine seems to be more popular outside North America. So Latinx is an English word mostly. And I think it became popular in writing before anyone much thought about pronunciation. A bit like Latin@.
I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language. Do you have a source?
>Probably it was influenced by spellings like folx and womxn.
Which is ... also a Germanic construction. Those words are not pronounceable in Spanish, Italian, or French. Is the idea that you just "imagine" that the word is spelled correctly when you pronounce it and this is just a thing you do when writing it?
> I have a very hard time believing that this was invented by people who speak a Romance language as their first language.
Children of Hispanic immigrants often feel more comfortable with English than Spanish yet many will still identify as “Hispanic”. So the word is more understandable if you see it as a product of a predominantly Anglophone Hispanic subculture
Who is using this term if it is not people who it is ostensibly used to describe? I can venture a guess.
"Latinx" is a sophisticated word from and for sophisticated people (such as the mentioned LGBT activists, who are often ready to adopt neutral replacements of masculine and feminine words); its usage should be considered an indicator of such sophistication (do you find it proper or silly?) and social contexts (who would you call "Latinx"? What would they think of you if you did?), all quite orthogonal to people's identity.
But I suspect there are many people who consider anyone smarter than them "elites" regardless of their actual social standing.
Many Hispanic people are natively bilingual. Many speak English primarily.
Folx sounds like it looks. Womxn sounds like woman or women usually. Latin@ depends on the speaker. Latinx rhymes with Kleenex.
It was supposed to rhyme with "thinks" from its inception.
I went to CU-Boulder and a part of the Latinx community, trust me, this is a quite hurtful anglo-ization of our tribe.
Three consonant endings do get routinely pronounced in full in English though, e.g. "thinks".
...which is probably a big reason why it doesn't gain traction. It doesn't make sense as a word in any language. It feels like a foreign object pushed into the language by someone who is obviously out of touch. One could easily come up with something that at least reads and sounds like a word: Latinoa, Latinem, Latines...
Another big reason is that it doesn't solve a problem that most people have. If you look at Urban Dictionary, you see that many "up-and-coming" word creations are solving actual semantic problems, gaining traction organically, from the bottom-up. This is how language changes naturally.
On the other hand, the hypothesis that "generic masculine" forms are harmful is borne out of academia. It is entirely speculative and for practical purposes, unfalsifiable. Most people have to be told that the "moral" position is to comply with such language changes "from the top", for some perceived "greater good". Appropriately, have a word for this: newspeak.
I'm not a language elitist or anything, but it's not a secret that language evolves towards easier and quicker pronunciation. And enforcing the opposite for ideological reasons is not just a bad idea, it's also doomed to fail.
What I find pretty funny about this whole discussion is that German is a language that seems very tuned to allow for additions of language. Meaning, if you want to "invent" a new word, the German language has a lot of tools to allow you to do that. Which probably explains the root cause here for why "Latinx" exists at all.
(I don’t really understand how “Latina/Latino” came to be used for this purpose to begin with.)
To be fair, English is extremely accustomed to etymological chimeras. A large portion of it is made of Old French, Latin and to a lesser degree Greek stems with English and Norse affixes/suffixes. Which is a perfectly valid way to import words while preserving the overarching grammar.
The problem with Latinx specifically is that it's closer to a regular expression than English.
What's the proper pronunciation for those words?
That’s not surprising, since it’s purely a product of “woke” culture in the USA, and the only people who use it are either multiple generations removed from their “ancestral” country, or have degrees in social sciences from Ivy League universities (or both).
South and Central America have bigger fish to fry than worrying about prudish neovictorian attitudes.
Maybe you should ask some of the indigenous peoples oh wait the colonizers pretty much wiped them out didn't they
North America remained available so late to colonization because the Spanish saw it as worthless as it didn't fit at all with their latifundial industry, precisely because it lacked the population and the farming that could easily be converted over to estates.
A significant part of North America is also Latin America, and vice-versa.
> There were large populations of agrarian peoples used as a workforce by the Spanish.
Therr were large populations of people virtually (and sometime precisely) enslaved by the Spabish as agrarian workforce; they weren’t always specifically agrarian (any more than any other preindustrial population, including the colonizers) before that.
And, yes, through enslavement and other mistreatment, they, and even moreso their pre-conquest identities and cultures, were often wiped out. Sure, there are some remnants and admixture with the colonizers and other imported subject populations; that’s true of the native subjects of genocide in the parts of North America colonized by the British and French, as well.
Latinx is a term invented and used by US cultural colonialists, that's both subjugating and xenophobic.
I don't think changing the language is necessary, but if we're adding regex to English. COUNT ME IN!