20 votes

Democrats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ language

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19 comments

  1. [16]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. AugustusFerdinand
      Link Parent
      Call it devil's advocate or call it an obvious answer, but it seems pretty clear that while the language the democrat party uses shouldn't be purposefully excluding GNC people, it probably...

      Though I’m frustrated that news coverage continues to muddy the water without consulting gender non-conforming (GNC) people. Even the 2020 Pew poll did not account for responses from GNC or transgender individuals. Out of three-thousand Hispanic poll-takers, surely a few people would have identified as trans? And if not, why not actively seek their opinions?

      Call it devil's advocate or call it an obvious answer, but it seems pretty clear that while the language the democrat party uses shouldn't be purposefully excluding GNC people, it probably shouldn't piss off a huge swath of everyone else in the process.

      5.6% (18.5 million) of the population is LGBT, only half of them are registered to vote, and only 6.5% of LGBT are GNC. Ignoring the whole language imperialism thing of, probably white, English speaking people telling hispanic people what they're going to call them, it certainly seems that they should stop using or even pushing for terminology to appease 601,250 potential GNC LGBT voters if it's going to possibly piss off 3.8 million hispanic voters (155M voters in 2020, 10% being hispanic, 61% voting democrat, 40% offended by latinx).

      16 votes
    2. [14]
      onyxleopard
      Link Parent
      As a linguist who can't make heads nor tails over this either, I think this is pandering from the political left toward a gender-conscious voter bloc. By gender-conscious I am invoking the lay...

      As a linguist who can't make heads nor tails over this either, I think this is pandering from the political left toward a gender-conscious voter bloc. By gender-conscious I am invoking the lay definition of gender (the first sense in the dictionary definition below from the New Oxford American Dictionary):

      gen·der | ˈjendər |
      noun

      1 either of the two sexes (male and female), especially when considered with reference to social and cultural differences rather than biological ones. The term is also used more broadly to denote a range of identities that do not correspond to established ideas of male and female: a condition that affects people of both genders | someone of the opposite gender | everyone always asks which gender I identify as.
      • members of a particular gender considered as a group: social interaction between the genders | encouraging women and girls to join fields traditionally dominated by the male gender.
      • the fact or condition of belonging to or identifying with a particular gender: video ads will target users based only on age and gender | traditional concepts of gender | I'm a strong believer that gender is fluid.

      2 Grammar (in languages such as Latin, Greek, Russian, and German) each of the classes (typically masculine, feminine, common, neuter) of nouns and pronouns distinguished by the different inflections that they have and require in words syntactically associated with them. Grammatical gender is only very loosely associated with natural distinctions of sex.
      • the property (in nouns and related words) of belonging to a gender: adjectives usually agree with the noun in gender and number.

      DERIVATIVES
      genderless | ˈjendərləs | adjective

      ORIGIN
      late Middle English: from Old French gendre (modern genre), based on Latin genus ‘birth, family, nation’. . > The earliest meanings were ‘kind, sort, genus’ and ‘type or class of noun, etc.’ (which was also a sense of Latin genus).

      USAGE
      The word gender has been used since the 14th century as a grammatical term, referring to classes of noun designated as masculine, feminine, or neuter in some languages. The sense denoting biological sex has also been used since the 14th century, but this did not become common until the mid 20th century. Although the words gender and sex are often used interchangeably, they have slightly different connotations; sex tends to refer to biological differences, while gender more often refers to cultural and social differences and sometimes encompasses a broader range of identities than the binary of male and female.

      See also Wikipedia's explanation of grammatical gender.

      The second sense of gender is only tenuously related to the social concept. I think it's nonsensical to insist that noun classes that have developed in ~25% of the world's natural languages and have been used without issue for hundreds or thousands of years is suddenly problematic. I wonder if this lexical ambiguity of the term gender never presented, and we just called this grammatical attribute by its other name of noun classes (or noun genera?), if the Latinx terminology might never have been invented?

      7 votes
      1. [11]
        Greg
        Link Parent
        I don't think it's necessarily fair to suggest that grammatical gender has zero interaction with societal concepts of gender. Just the fact that the masculine is the default, that a single man in...

        I don't think it's necessarily fair to suggest that grammatical gender has zero interaction with societal concepts of gender. Just the fact that the masculine is the default, that a single man in a group of women changes that group to be linguistically masculine, is hard to dismiss as coincidence given the patriarchal roots of most societies.

        Even in English, if you look at instruction manuals and articles from pre-1970s or so they'll invariably use "he" and expect it to cover women as well, rather than using "they". People still question the singular "they" for a known individual, but it's become totally natural when referring to a single unknown individual, and that's been a conscious change away from masculine as a default.

        All that said, I'm in absolute agreement with the article: there's already a perfectly good gender neutral term (in both senses of the word) in "Hispanic", a huge number of Spanish speakers consider Latinx to be unpronounceable and eye-roll-inducing at best, and frankly there are much larger things at stake in US politics right now. Deal with the direct threat to American democracy first, worry about divisive intricacies of language later.

        12 votes
        1. [10]
          onyxleopard
          Link Parent
          But that is only the case in a language where masculine and feminine are the only genders. Would having a feminine default be preferable? It is arbitrary. Saying that we need to resist grammatical...

          Just the fact that the masculine is the default, that a single man in a group of women changes that group to be linguistically masculine, is hard to dismiss as coincidence given the patriarchal roots of most societies.

          But that is only the case in a language where masculine and feminine are the only genders. Would having a feminine default be preferable? It is arbitrary. Saying that we need to resist grammatical systems, as if grammar itself is some tyrannical bogeyman, is just an insane misapprehension of how language and society work. If you have a mixed gender group of ethnically Latino people, there are so many other options than creating new lexical items that intentionally defy the morphosyntax of Spanish.

          Singular “they” is a perfectly fine solution to a lexical gap in English because it is just extending its use to be a gender-neutral personal pronoun. I’d be just as perplexed if people started using “ix” or “itx” as a plural, gender-neutral, English pronoun instead of singular “they” as I am about “Latinx”.

          7 votes
          1. [2]
            eladnarra
            Link Parent
            Some English-speaking nonbinary folks (and others) do use pronouns other than they/them/theirs, like xe/xem/xyr, ze/hir/hirs, and ey/em/eir to name a few.

            Singular “they” is a perfectly fine solution to a lexical gap in English because it is just extending its use to be a gender-neutral personal pronoun. I’d be just as perplexed if people started using “ix” or “itx” as a plural, gender-neutral, English pronoun instead of singular “they” as I am about “Latinx”.

            Some English-speaking nonbinary folks (and others) do use pronouns other than they/them/theirs, like xe/xem/xyr, ze/hir/hirs, and ey/em/eir to name a few.

            8 votes
            1. onyxleopard
              Link Parent
              But those pronouns don’t violate the phonotactics and morphosyntax of English, so they are at most just something unexpected and not unpronounceable nor uninflectable.

              But those pronouns don’t violate the phonotactics and morphosyntax of English, so they are at most just something unexpected and not unpronounceable nor uninflectable.

              5 votes
          2. [7]
            Greg
            Link Parent
            A tyrannical bogeyman? No. But grammatical rules are a product of the societies that made them, and there's every chance that they will reflect the historical and current biases of those...

            A tyrannical bogeyman? No. But grammatical rules are a product of the societies that made them, and there's every chance that they will reflect the historical and current biases of those societies. Do these rules also serve to perpetuate those biases? I think it's at least possible and worthy of discussion.

            Beyond that, I agree with you: Latinx seems like a top-down imposition that the vast majority of people dislike, so it's a bad attempt at a solution and a bad entry point to the discussion of whether a solution is even needed. We abso-fucking-lutely have bigger fish to fry, regardless, so allowing this to become a divisive issue at all seems like an enormous political own goal.

            The only assumption I'm questioning, and only here in the context of a fairly niche and navel-gazey forum, is the suggestion that grammar is inherently neutral.

            7 votes
            1. [6]
              onyxleopard
              Link Parent
              No, that’s not how natural language evolves. This is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the field of Linguistics has falsified. There are lots of evolutionary pressures on natural...

              But grammatical rules are a product of the societies that made them, and there's every chance that they will reflect the historical and current biases of those societies.

              No, that’s not how natural language evolves. This is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the field of Linguistics has falsified.

              There are lots of evolutionary pressures on natural language, but, for instance, in English, we still inflect personal pronouns for gender, yet we also have ungenderd pronouns, like “it”. But, nobody sat down and invented “it” because they wanted a pronoun that bucked the noun class system. English is also currently losing its case marking system on pronouns (many people don’t use “whom” any more, or use it idiosyncratically). But English losing pronominal case alternations is not a reflection of grammatical protest in any conscious way. It is just a result of natural selection.

              Language and society certainly both evolve and have influence on one another, but, I think it is incorrect (in a dangerous way) to say that humans “make” language or society in any sort of intentional way like you are suggesting.

              9 votes
              1. [4]
                0d_billie
                (edited )
                Link Parent
                Not completely, in fairness. The strong version has been, but there is evidence to suggest that the weak version does still have some merit. There are many good examples, but particularly relevant...

                No, that’s not how natural language evolves. This is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the field of Linguistics has falsified.

                Not completely, in fairness. The strong version has been, but there is evidence to suggest that the weak version does still have some merit. There are many good examples, but particularly relevant here is that speakers of gendered languages (such as Spanish, German) will typically associate stereotypically masculine properties with male-gendered nouns.

                Also worth noting that there are a whole host of African languages where there are up to 20 genders which have fully nothing to do with male and female properties. Like much in linguistics, gender as a term has very different connotations when compared to the common vernacular.

                8 votes
                1. [3]
                  onyxleopard
                  (edited )
                  Link Parent
                  Yes, this has been observed (it's described in the Wikipedia article I linked), but people also associate social gender properties with objects even when they don't speak languages that exhibit...

                  There are many good examples, but particularly relevant here is that speakers of gendered languages (such as Spanish, German) will typically associate stereotypically masculine properties with male-gendered nouns.

                  Yes, this has been observed (it's described in the Wikipedia article I linked), but people also associate social gender properties with objects even when they don't speak languages that exhibit grammatical gender. E.g., in English (where we only inflect for gender on some personal pronouns), we use female personal pronouns in reference to vessels. Or, in the case of cattle, there is a bunch of domain-specific, gendered terminology. Or gendered words like mother, father, sister, brother. These extend to other totally gender-nonspecific things like motherlode, motherboard, daughterboard, sister groups (in phylogeny), crawdads (even female crayfish are called crawdads), etc. Speaking a language without noun cases does not make you immune from associating gender with concepts despite their being totally unrelated to the social construct. Language is not the cause of social gender inequity. I do not believe in the slightest that either learning to speak languages that have different noun case systems than your native language, nor concocting neologisms like Latinx, will make you nor society any more egalitarian, per se.

                  Also worth noting that there are a whole host of African languages where there are up to 20 genders which have fully nothing to do with male and female properties. Like much in linguistics, gender as a term has very different connotations when compared to the common vernacular.

                  Yes, I linked the Wikipedia article on grammatical gender which explains this. Grammatical gender is just a property that is associated with certain morphemes in languages that have noun cases and often requires some sort of agreement within noun phrases. For a language like Spanish which has only two genders (masculine/feminine) it makes one wonder what is the determiner form inflected for gender agreement with Latinx? Is it un/unos/el/los Latinx, una/unas/la/las Latinx, xn/lx/??? Latinx? If you violate the morphosyntax of Spanish like this, you're not speaking Spanish any more.

                  8 votes
                  1. [2]
                    0d_billie
                    Link Parent
                    I hadn't actually spotted that you linked the Wikipedia article to Sapir-Whorf, apologies. I agree with you here, but with the caveat that I think language use has the potential to perpetuate...

                    I hadn't actually spotted that you linked the Wikipedia article to Sapir-Whorf, apologies.

                    Speaking a language without noun cases does not make you immune from associating gender with concepts despite their being totally unrelated to the social construct. Language is not the cause of social gender inequity. I do not believe in the slightest that either learning to speak languages that have different noun case systems than your native language, nor concocting neologisms like Latinx, will make you nor society any more egalitarian, per se.

                    I agree with you here, but with the caveat that I think language use has the potential to perpetuate social gender inequality. As has been mentioned above, various kinds of instruction manual often use gendered pronouns in English. I often find myself paraphrasing board game instructions on the fly because my group skews female, but the instructions invariably use he/him.

                    I don't think that eradicating grammatical gender has merit, nor that it would make society more egalitarian. It's a shame that any linguistic features become extinct, but to explicitly eradicate one would be far worse.

                    5 votes
                    1. onyxleopard
                      Link Parent
                      I’m absolutely with you on changing our own use of language to be more inclusive. What I’m railing against is changing language itself in an unnatural way. It is a subtle distinction worth...

                      I’m absolutely with you on changing our own use of language to be more inclusive. What I’m railing against is changing language itself in an unnatural way. It is a subtle distinction worth spelling out more clearly. 🙂

                      3 votes
              2. Greg
                Link Parent
                Clearing out notifications and realised I never replied to this - I didn't mean to imply intent, so perhaps "generated" or "originated" would have been a better word than "made". Anyway, seems...

                Clearing out notifications and realised I never replied to this - I didn't mean to imply intent, so perhaps "generated" or "originated" would have been a better word than "made". Anyway, seems like the conversation has already played itself out, I just didn't like leaving my own ambiguity hanging like that!

      2. [2]
        PopeRigby
        Link Parent
        Call me pedantic, but I think it's important to remember that the Democrats are not on the Left.

        Call me pedantic, but I think it's important to remember that the Democrats are not on the Left.

        3 votes
        1. onyxleopard
          Link Parent
          Sure, I guess they’re pandering to the left. (Just a very vocal minority of the left, I think.)

          Sure, I guess they’re pandering to the left. (Just a very vocal minority of the left, I think.)

          3 votes
  2. [4]
    Adys
    Link
    I ranted about this here before (to little support): https://tildes.net/~talk/yjm/what_is_something_youve_changed_your_mind_about_recently#comment-6sgy I’m not personally affected, I shouldn’t...

    I ranted about this here before (to little support): https://tildes.net/~talk/yjm/what_is_something_youve_changed_your_mind_about_recently#comment-6sgy

    I’m not personally affected, I shouldn’t really care. But I do work for a LATAM startup right now and none of our Hispanics on the team like the latinx term.

    It’s very mansplainy to push it when the people concerned don’t like it.

    Is there a word for that? How about Whitesplaining?

    10 votes
    1. cloud_loud
      Link Parent
      Oh wow I wasn’t expecting to see my own comment there. I kind of ignored all the replies since I knew it was gonna be a shit-show. But, as I am Latino, I agree with you. And I’m a Latino that was...

      Oh wow I wasn’t expecting to see my own comment there. I kind of ignored all the replies since I knew it was gonna be a shit-show. But, as I am Latino, I agree with you. And I’m a Latino that was born in the U.S, so I should be more open to using “latinx” but I’m not, and most of us aren’t, clearly. But that support drops to 0% if you ask people actually from Latin America (like my parents).

      I don’t know if I “prefer” Hispanic, it’s just that I’m so used to it in paperwork now. I usually just call myself Mexican though.

      11 votes
    2. [2]
      moocow1452
      Link Parent
      Whitesplaning is a recognized phenomenon in the activist canon, so it's about as good a fit as you can get. As far as solutions from within, Latine has been floated as a potential solution, as...

      Whitesplaning is a recognized phenomenon in the activist canon, so it's about as good a fit as you can get.

      As far as solutions from within, Latine has been floated as a potential solution, as seen here

      https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2019/10/15/20914347/latin-latina-latino-latinx-means

      No group is a monolith, but it fits better into grammatical constructs and is easier to verbalize, so it has that going for it.

      7 votes
      1. Adys
        Link Parent
        Yeah I think Latine is fine. It’s not up to me to choose anyway.

        Yeah I think Latine is fine. It’s not up to me to choose anyway.

        4 votes