thomas leverett weblog

folx & Latinx

 

People in my word group are sharply divided about the innovation in language that brings us folx and Latinx, the second of which I don't know how to pronounce. Words such as these are increasingly common in communities where people want to signal their general inclusiveness and openness to non-gender binary people.

As usual, as a language observer, I am more inclined to study the actual change in the language, than to bat around my opinions about what should or shouldn't happen. My general observation is that it will happen anyway, if it's going to, regardless of anything I say or want. And that goes for most of us in the word group too. We can rant and rave all we want about how something doesn't make sense in language terms, or is unnecessary, or whatever, but either people will find it useful or they won't, and that will determine the success of the innovation.

A case in point is the appearance of Ms., which I clearly remember. I remember objecting on the grounds that it was an abbreviation but it didn't have a corresponding word. How can you have an abbreviation when it doesn't abbreviate a real word? But resistance to Ms. was futile. It was useful to women to not have the way they were addressed reveal theri marital status, rightly or wrongly. It was useful to me because often I didn't know their marital status or didn't care, and I certainly never felt like I had to reveal it as part of addressing them. I began using it myself and liking it. After a while I forgot the absurdity of an abbreviation that doesn't abbreviate anything. Well, I guess I never forgot it. But who actually cares about that these days?

Now of the x words, I have singled out these two for a reason. With folx language purists argue that folks is already inclusive and just informal enough to refer to everybody no matter what anyway. But you watch. Even though the pronunciation of folx and folks is exactly the same, as far as I can tell, there will be good reasons for folx to catch on and survive in the written world. With Latinx, there's a better reason for it to catch on: that Latina and Latino by nature reveal gender and force the speaker into a binary agreement. And sometimes you don't know the gender, or the gender preference, or what to do when forced into that kind of binary choice. But alas, with Latinx, as I said, I don't know how to pronounce it. With time, maybe that will get easier too.

My last observation is that what matters really is whether it catches on with the vast majority of relatively non-involved language users. On my word group people are fighting like they are really invested in the outcome, like it's some kind of political movement that they either love or hate. It is political, I'll grant you that. But it's the non-political language users who will decide the outcome in the end. Either it's useful to them, or it isn't, and so, either they'll use it or they won't. In my opinion both will survive in some form or another, though they may not thrive like Ms. has. Time will tell.

Labels: language, linguistics, vocabulary

posted by tom @ 7:46 AM