As a Spanish speaker, I particularly hate Latinx - it just feels wrong. It was clearly invented by a non-Spanish speaker, so why do we use it? What's wrong with Latine (la-tee-nuh) or just Latin?
In English, Latin has existed as a group term meaning “Latino or Latina” back as far as the 30s and before. Why not use that?
In Spanish, I barely remember anyone saying Latina or Latino or Hispanic. People identify others by country - una chilena, un mexicano, etc.
It is my feeling that this word and some other recent coinages are invented as shibboleths to identify a certain class of American academic.
As a left leftist, I think it’s a wild diversion from anything important.
I didn't grow up speaking Spanish, but I did grow up speaking French (and I started learning German at 7, though I don't have the same feel for it).
It's my claim that people who advocate for Latinx simply do not have a feel for gendered languages.
In a gendered language, every noun has a gender, it's built into every construction in the language, and you can't even think around it.
More, that gender does not correspond to societal gender or biological gender. "The person" in Spanish is la persona, female, so you would say, ¿La persona que estuvo aquí? Ella se fue. — “That person who was here? She left,” even if that person were male.
In Germanic languages, diminutives make things neuter, so “the little girl” in German is das Mädchen, neuter, and you would refer to the child as es, “it”, if you had just used Mädchen, but sie, "she" if you had used Fraulein, "Miss".
(Other languages like Indonesian and Hungarian have no grammatical gender at all, only some nouns or adjectives meaning “girl", "male" and such. But I digress.)
So creating a new non-Spanish word which is obviously male in grammatical gender and claiming it represents some new non-gendered thing sticks out like a turd in your oatmilk if you care about the Spanish language.
On the other hand, latine fits perfectly into Spanish.
The -e ending is already used for gender-free words:
un cantante - a singer (presumed male)
una cantante - a female singer
And it adapts to existing gendered words — un viajero (male traveller), una viajera (female traveler), un viajere (gender unspecified). My browser highlights viajere in red because it’s not Spanish, but any Spanish speaker would get to it pretty fast.
Even gender-free pronouns would be possible this way — un, una, une neutral gender — Soy une viagere de Chile, “I am an (ungendered) travelled from Chile”.
It is my claim that if you started speaking that way today your average Spanish speaker would understand everything you said and just think you had some weird accent.
Think about that for a bit — if you spoke Spanish, you could start speaking in a non-gendered fashion right now, and if you didn’t make a big deal out of it, people would understand you. Start now, two generations from now everyone might do it.
But are you really going to expect people to say viajerx and unx and be understood?
Latina, latine, latino. ah, eh, oh. How logical and euphonious. If in English, people pronounce it "La-teen", that's fine - it's still a new word.
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The person who invented the word Latinx, whoever they were, didn't care about language. They thought in English.
But they didn’t look at the history of English to see how we had solved this problem already. They didn't get the consensus of a group of Spanish speakers. They didn't ask the community what might be a good name, and how to approach the whole problem of gender in Spanish. They didn't spend ten minutes with a book on Spanish grammar, or take a gander at what Latin, the father of Spanish, does for a neutral gender.
It was an academic, and they said, "I will put an X on the end of this, because X is cool, and then I'm going to use shame and groupthink to impose this on other people who have no interest in this at all. It will be a way for the faux woke to identify themselves, and I will have invented it and imposed it on others, me, me me me me."
Words like “latinx” do not unite but divide. They are a social signifier of being in a certain small cultural milieu and mindset. They are authoritarian in a small and pathetic way.
Sorry for the verbiage, but I’m sick of this attempt by a tiny number of American academics to push this thoughtless coinage onto well over a billion people (half a billion Spanish speakers, and some amorphous number of English speakers).
Latinx will never catch on in Spanish, because Spanish is a beautiful language, and a lot of Spanish speakers care about how it sounds.
Latin already exists in English to mean “Latina or Latino”, so why not use that? Because it wouldn’t show off membership in a group.
On the other hand, degendering all of Spanish in a gradual, non-coercive fashion is possible if you use the -e ending. No soy Latine, pero soy y siempre seré une persone. “I am not Latin, but I am and will always be a person.”
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Oh, and I’d like to say this — given the dire state that we are in right now as a society and a planet, trying to get rid of a couple of perfectly good words used by hundreds of millions of people, words that aren’t actually insulting, offensive or come from an offensive root, is just about the worst use of anyone’s time ever on this mad world.
When evaluating where to spend one’s limited time on a project, one needs to consider three factors — how much work it is, how likely is it to succeed, and how critically important it is to oneself, one’s family, one’s community, or to the world.
Replacing latina and latino with latinx would involve just a prodigious amount of whining at the entire world over decades; actual Spanish speakers will simply never be convinced; and if by some mishap this caught on, the net effect on the world would be next to nothing, because neither latina nor latina are offensive to start with, and Spanish would continue to be strongly gendered!
Lots of work, likely to fail, and of tiny, perhaps negative importance — a project that scores badly on all three factors. “Worst use of time ever.”
All this effort on nothing while the world as you know it burns around you. Future historians, if there are any, will just throw up their hands.
