In recent years, if you’ve been online (or listened to NPR, or watched the news on TV), you’ve no doubt come across the term latinx. It’s intended to replace latino in Spanish (and English), and is ostensibly a remedy for the gendered — and presumably therefore non-inclusive — nature of latino. Proponents argue that it is inclusive of people other than men and the x is more inclusive than @, which is inclusive of men and women, but not nonbinary and other people (usually, on twitter, folx). Detractors argue that it is unpronounceable ( Latin-equis? Latinks? Latin-eks, which is explicitly English?), and could lead to unpronounceable and uninterpretable language (“lxs personxs sxn humanxs”), and is an English imposition on Spanish that isn’t used or liked by 97% of Spanish speakers in the US.

I try to respect people’s language, culture, and self-determination, so I don’t really care one way or the other, and if the people I’m speaking to prefer latinx I’ll use it however they pronounce it. This is what linguists call “audience design”, and regular people call “being nice” and it helps you get along with people. I think people are, in general, so busy trying to prove that latinx is wrong (or right!) that they are missing what’s actually interesting about it:

The new gender-inclusive language in Spanish respects an animacy distinction.

More specifically, it’s between human and non-human nouns (and derived nouns). So people are busy arguing about latinxs, and amigxs, and personxs, but nobody is talking about xl librx instead of el libro ‘the book’. Actually, this isn’t entirely true, as I’ve seen it extended to pets, as in algunx de mis perrxs ‘one of my dogs’ and mis gatxs ‘my cats’. That said, animals who have different names for the sexes (e.g., a bull and a cow) aren’t included (that’s not to say you can’t find lxs vacxs, but it’s only used to dunk on gender inclusive language from PETA, as far as I can tell). So the line is not human/non-human, but it’s definitely pretty close — perhaps humans and pets, but not domesticated animals.

To a linguist, this is genuinely interesting (or rather, should be, but I haven’t seen any linguists discuss this yet. That may be that I’m just following the wrong linguists online). So to the extent that people are actually using this language in Spanish, they are creating a three gender system with masculine, feminine, and animate genders, it triggers agreement in other words (like algunx), and we get to watch it develop in real time. This is super cool! We know that the masculine/feminine distinction in Romance languages, if you go far enough back, originated as an animacy distinction (I mean really far back). We know that masculine/feminine/neuter gave way to two non-sexed genders in Dutch (masculine and feminine collapsed into one, leaving a common/neuter distinction). But we might actually have the opportunity to watch a language develop an animacy distinction in nouns and pronouns over a generation or two, in real time, and that’s truly exciting. And what’s interesting is not that it’s “ruining Spanish” but rather — how does this work for direct object and indirect object marking? What about indirect object pronouns for animate indirect objects (as in, les escribe una carta a sus amigos — should we expect the non-gender-marking, but plural-marking le and les to begin to respect a gender distinction between animate on hand and masculine/feminine on another, as in lxs escribe una carta a sus amigxs?). Is this primarily a written distinction? For whom and in what instances is it not?

So, my takeaways are:

latinx is genuinely linguistically interesting, but not because of the anger and vitriol over gender, but rather because that social conflict may give rise to a new grammatical system, and
It’s not hard to be nice, and sometimes it’s better to choose to be nice than to try to prove that you’re right. So why not be nice?

Of course, if anyone knows of linguistic work on these topics I would love to read it. In the mean time, I can sum this all up with: quit yelling at each other and pay attention to how interesting what is really happening actually is!

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