‘Latinx’ Is Linguistic Tyranny

An image of the word "latino" in a Spanish language dictionary. Sarah Le/The Epoch Times

Commentary

Forty-five years ago, after two months of U.S. Army boot camp in beautiful, bucolic Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., in late April 1978 I arrived at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., to learn Russian. It was a time of increasing Cold War tensions. Communism was on the march.

South Vietnam fell to communist North Vietnam in 1975. That year, Castro’s troops installed a communist regime in Angola. In 1977, the communist Mengistu regime, backed by Moscow, took over Ethiopia, and soon perpetrated the worst famine since Mao’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. In 1979, the communist Sandinista regime seized power in Nicaragua. And the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up a puppet regime.

Our teachers in Monterey all were native Russian speakers, exiles from Soviet tyranny. One of the first things they taught us was the Marxist-Leninists, when they took over after the Russian Revolution in 1917, changed the Russian language. It went far beyond just insisting on tovarishch (comrade) instead of grazhdanin (citizen).

The Russia Beyond website features a good article explaining what happened:

[Its] intention was to ditch everything ‘old’—the tsarist regime, religion, the economy, and the language.

In 1918, a decree on new spelling rules was issued and all printed publications were obliged to follow them. The pre-revolutionary spelling was virtually outlawed. ...

White [anti-Bolshevik] émigrés who left the country after the Revolution refused to accept the new spelling, and accused the Bolsheviks of mutilating the Russian language. Some reforms long had been proposed, and probably would have been adopted gradually, and organically. What was shocking was how a dictatorship could quickly change the language at its own whim.

Although I don’t know Chinese, similar changes were pushed by the Chinese Communist Party after Mao’s 1949 takeover. In Far Eastern Survey in 1956, Tao-Tai Hsia, a Yale University professor, described what happened in “The Language Revolution in Communist China”:

A veteran Far Eastern news analyst in the United States concluded that the main reason for Communist China’s doing away with the elegant and traditional ideographs was that the physical structure of Chinese characters suggests some very un-Marxian notions. …

The present fundamental language reform ... epitomizes the Communists’ ... ability to alter the Chinese cultural heritage so that more efficient indoctrination of the people, tighter control of mass organizations, and a higher level of industrialization can be assured. That article came out just before the Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) socialist industrialization scheme, 1958-62, failed—and starved to death as many as 55 million people.

I bring this up because Zocalo Public Square ran an article on the Latinx controversy, “Why Is the Latinx Debate So Fierce? Gender, Language, and Identity Are Complicated. But Inclusivity Doesn’t Have to Be.”

Actually, it isn’t “complicated.” For one thing, I know a lot of Latinos, and none uses Latinx lingo. My Spanish is sketchy. But when I talk to working-class Latinos, such as those who work around my apartment complex, they’re not using Latinx. Like the communist language changes in Russia after 1918 and China after 1949, this strictly is a top-down, dictatorial movement.

The Zocalo article, by Sebastian Ferrada, explains:

I would have several conversations with family and friends about what this meant for me, what pronouns I would now use, and how we would have patience with each other in learning and moving forward. Patience was necessary, given that the debate over the use of Latinx (and more recently, Latine) to refer to people with origins in Latin America has gone in dizzying circles. Since the term Latinx gained popularity in 2016, it and its variations (for me, Latine offers more phonetic fluidity)—have become a source of fierce disagreements among Latine people of all races, ages, genders, and sexual identities.

In recent years, “gender,” originally only a linguistic word, has come to mean what we used to call “sex,” as in male and female in mammalian anatomy and physiology. But sticking with the original meaning of “gender,” some languages have two genders for all or almost all words. Spanish, based on Latin, is one of these. (Russian also has a third gender, neuter; even the Bolsheviks didn’t try to change that.) Words ending in “o” are masculine gender; those ending in “a” are feminine. You learn that on the first day of Spanish 101.

Thus: Latino (male) and Latina (female). Which the modern ideology wants to reduce to Latinx or Latine.

Zocalo:

But the debates largely miss the point: whether one prefers to use Latinx or Latine, both terms recognize and honor the presence of gender-fluid identities. What is most striking about these “debates” is that they rarely (if ever) center the voices and experiences of those who do identify with the term—namely, transgender, non-binary, and gender-fluid Latine communities.

The linguistic debate on Latinx, then, serves as a useful example to understand the transphobia prevalent in our community and the importance of adopting language that better reflects our communities writ large. That’s all nonsense. Word salad. What’s really going is a Bolshevik attempt to change the very way we use language—the way we think.

The Latinx attempt to alter the Spanish language is reminiscent of Newspeak in Orwell’s “Nineteen Eight-Four.” He wrote in the novel’s appendix, “The Principles of Newspeak”:

Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. ...

The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. ... It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile it gained ground steadily, all Party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. ...

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought—that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc—should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Violations of Newspeak syntax were branded “crimethink.”

Language is the essence of being human. It distinguishes us from the brute animals, who go only on instinct. It’s reason itself.

As the great Colombian aphorist Don Colacho wrote, “El desgaste de un idioma es más rápido, y la civilización que sobre él se asienta más frágil, cuando el pedantismo gramatical se olvida. Las civilizaciones son períodos de gramática normativa.”

(A language’s attrition is faster, and the civilization that rests on it more fragile, when grammatical pedantry is forgotten. Civilizations are periods of standard grammar.)

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.