On her first day on the job as Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order banning the word "Latinx" from government documents.
The order, which she says was issued "to respect the Latino community," says that "ethnically insensitive and pejorative language," and the term Latinx specifically, "has no place" in government documents or employee titles.
Latinx, by definition, is a gender-neutral alternative to Latina or Latino.
"One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels and verbs from English," the order says.
RLY?
K
WTVR
As one of the former Press Secretaries for Donald Joffrey Trump, SHS presumably knows a thing or two about language, and I can't dispute that "Latinx" grates the ears of some Latinos and Latinas — much the same as they/them preferred pronouns do to some Anglx stick-in-the-muds.
Nouns have gender in Spanish, as do the adjectives modifying them, and there isn't a neuter option as there was in the language from which Spanish sprang.
I can imagine some pedant in the dawn of the Dark Ages grousing about the pueri hodie dropping all the neuter declensions from their lingo like a bunch of damn Ostrogoths. But such are the dynamics of language, especially when cultures meet and mingle.
Far be it from me to tell Hispanophones how their language should be run. Personally, I'd let the genderqueer niñxs keep "Latinx" and get rid of that ll thing. But that's just yx.
Sinceramente tuyx,
Su amigx Pablx
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