In recent years, there has been a significant push by some Spanish speakers to replace the gender-neutral use of masculine plural words like “todos” (“everyone” or “all”) with true gender-neutral alternatives such as “todxs”, “tod@s”, and “todes”¹. The point of this short text will not be to argue whether we should change this aspect of the language, but rather to discuss what I consider a weird preference most people seem to have on which option to use as an alternative.

Some indeterminate number of days ago I committed the unforgivable sin of looking into the most terrible corner of the Internet: any TikTok video’s comment section. Of course, this fatal mistake of mine was punished with exposure to a really bad take. The comment I saw this time said something to the effect of “Why would I watch that? It’s not American”.

There is just something about this idea that really irritates me. This complete refusal to consume media made by people from outside your nation shows such a myopic vision of the world that it makes me want to punch them.

As you may already know, my first language wasn’t Spanish, it was Brazilian Portuguese. Of course, now my Spanish (and even my English!) are much better than my Portuguese, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t left me with a subtle accent some people sometimes notice.

As of now, I can point out to 2 specific quirks of my accent that cause this. The first one is my pronunciation of the palatal nasal /ɲ/ sound, better known as “ñ”. Usually, one would produce this sound as any other nasal consonant like /n/ and /m/: by blocking the airflow in the place of articulation and letting it exit through the nose. However, I realize it as a nasalized palatal approximant [ȷ̃], which means I don’t fully block the airflow. For instance, I say [es.paˈȷ̃ol] and not [es.paˈɲol]. This is more common in Brazilian Portuguese than Spanish, although this Wikipedia page does cite some examples in both languages, including an obscure variety of Spanish called “Zwole-Ebarb Spanish”.