studying-letters:

studying-letters:

Although there’s good intentions behind it, using latinx or latinxs as gender neutral terms isn’t right. Both Spanish and Portuguese - because not all of us speak the same language* - already have “gender neutral” terms.

Latina is for a woman. Latinas for 2 or more women.

Latino is for a men. Latinos for 2 or more men.

But latinos is also for a group of both men and women and it’s gender neutral too.

Actually, Spanish and Portuguese don’t really have gender neutral pronouns and/or terms, so the masculine forms are used as gender neutral, with few exceptions.  

There’s no need to say “latinxs”, you can just say “latinos”.

And since we’re on this topic, I’d also like to clarify that Hispanic and Latino don’t mean the same thing.

Hispanic = first language is Spanish **

Latino = comes from Latin America

So, therefore:

Mexicans are both Hispanic and Latinos.

Venezuelans are both Hispanic and Latinos.

Brazilians are Latinos, but not Hispanic. (speak Portuguese)

Haitians are Latinos, but not Hispanic. (speak French)

Spanish people are Hispanic, but not Latinos.

Also, latino isn’t a race. A latino can be black, brown, white, mixed, yellow, indigenous…anything at all and still be a latino. It has nothing to do with skin color but with where you were born, what language you were first taught, and a specific historic and cultural background.

*Unfortunately, those two are the only languages I know, besides English, so I’m only using them in this post. If any French speaker would like to add these terms in French, it’d be awesome.

**The term Hispanic comes from Hispania, meaning Spain, and it’s used to refer to anything related to Spain, including countries/people who were colonized by Spain or have Spanish ancestry. Which is why I’ve heard many Spanish-speakers say that they’d rather not be called Hispanic, since it ties them to their colonizer.

@dumbassrights

I’m not ignoring. Firstly because I didn’t even know some people used it. But this is a grammar and linguistics blog (among other things), so I’ll always post the correct terms (correct in the sense of what the academic world uses - and the academic language doesn’t always correspond to what we use on a daily basis - and also what terms I see most often).

If you use latine, you can keep doing it. Obviously, I can’t stop you. Nor do I want to. This was simply to shed some light to gringos about our languages and culture.

I am curious about something though, and if you could answer me it’d be nice. The ones who use “latine” instead of “latino/latina”, were they born in Latin America or somewhere else?