About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It [REPORT]

By Luis Noe-Bustamante, Lauren Mora and Mark Hugo Lopez

Pan-ethnic labels describing the U.S. population of people tracing their roots to Latin America and Spain have been introduced over the decades, rising and falling in popularity. Today, the two dominant labels in use are Hispanic and Latino, with origins in the 1970s and 1990s respectively.

More recently, a new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative that is used by some news and entertainment outlets, corporations, local governments and universities to describe the nation’s Hispanic population.

However, for the population it is meant to describe, only 23% of U.S. adults who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the term Latinx, and just 3% say they use it to describe themselves, according to a nationally representative, bilingual survey of U.S. Hispanic adults conducted in December 2019 by Pew Research Center.

The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions. In the United States, the first uses of Latinx appeared more than a decade ago. It was added to a widely used English dictionary in 2018, reflecting its greater use.

Yet the use of Latinx is not common practice, and the term’s emergence has generated debate about its appropriateness in a gendered language like Spanish. Some critics point to its origins among U.S. English speakers, saying it ignores the Spanish language and its gendered form.1 Still, there are examples of the term’s use in Spanish in the U.S. and abroad.2 Meanwhile, others see Latinx as a gender- and LGBTQ-inclusive term, reflecting a broader movement within the U.S. around gender identity.

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