It’s interesting that so much focus is on getting people who are likely we’ll meaning but don’t keep up with the nuance. Heard someone called a bigot because they used the word Latina instead of the correct latinx. If you knew them you’d know they have family of diverse backgrounds so may not have even known the right word and likely didn’t mean “harm”
>used the word Latina instead of the correct latinx.
It's not the "correct" term, and almost nobody I know of takes it seriously outside of really, really narrow little social media woke bubbles. If someone is a woman and of latin american origin, they will almost universally refer to themselves as latina and not care if others do. What idiotic nonsense to assume that something else is "correct" despite it going against the grain of a vast majority's word use.
I live in Latin America and have latin american family of all kinds. This aside from many friendships of both sexes and variable gender identifications too.
In America, barely any (2%) of the Latino population identify with it, yet it gets pushed anyway. In fact, 40% are actively bothered by it. Forcing use of it is such a bizarre hill to die on.
I was born in Central America and while not a comprehensive sample, I don’t know a single person where I’m from who doesn’t think this an American imposed thing that’s trying to fix our “wrong” culture.
Negative feedback after correcting a native speaker is either evidence of the sexiest bigoted Latinx culture - or evidence of a type of cultural imperialism depending on where you stand on these issues. I just wish folks could draw clearer connections to the harm of using Latina vs latinx
It offends upper middle class, privileged white women with questionably valid university degrees in the Humanities and a value system based around the extremely questionable critical theory, rather than the extremely successful for humanity method we know as reason (or the less successful but at least proven to mostly not implode and utterly destroy society method of religious conservatism)
How is that any different than just saying “Latin” … I’m genuinely trying to think of how this might be pronounced, particularly with an eye towards American regional accents and yeah… it’s not great.
Latine:
- Lah-teen … rhymes white latrine
- Lat-ein-e … normal “lat”, Germanic pronunciation of “ein”, like the number one or Einstein, “e” pronounced either “ee” or “eh”
- Latin-e … latin-ee, rhymes with matinee,
- lat-tine … lah-tine as in the tines of a fork.
Or my favourite
- Latin-e … just “latin” but spelled with a silent “e”.
This is less than ideal… outside of using mispronunciation as a shibboleth, you normally want a group identifying word to be clearly identified and picked up by any possible group members regardless of if they have heard someone speak it. You want such words to be easily used by the people who identify with it, also crucially it’s self-adoption by the group that is being identified that matters… If no one you would call latine likes you calling them latine, or latinx, or Latino or Latina or Latin… you probably should just ask them what they want and call them that instead, that’s just my opinion from over in Australia where this particular identity/word fight appears to have mostly gone unnoticed against our own local issues.
Admittedly the question of how to pronounce a Spanish word in English is non-trivial and subsumes the question of how to pronounce Spanish and the question of how to pronounce English ... but apart from that no special case is required for the word "latine"!
It's a tool of social positioning, and helps an academic precariat oust incumbents in fields where there really aren't a lot of positions and whose degrees are good for little but academia or being political commissars at organizations that actually do something useful.
