2023-07-14 18:27:37
For the third time, after 2018 and 2021, the Council for German Spelling has discussed the gender star and other signs used in the so-called gender-equitable language. For the third time he has not given a clear recommendation. And that’s just as well.
It would be odd at a time when political opposition to gender is increasing (in line with a large majority of the population), and when even ARD’s largest broadcaster, WDR, has announced that it will review its pro-gender practice signal if the spelling councils had included the gender symbols in the inventory of official spelling. In any case, there was never any question of making gender spelling mandatory – as some had feared. Among them Bavaria’s Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU), who announced before the publication of the Council decision that there would be no obligation to gender in Bavaria.
Whereby the word “decision” is almost too big for what the spelling advice announced on Friday at a press conference in Eupen, Belgium, the venue. As a result of a more than two-hour discussion, which the chairman of the council Josef Lange described as “very controversial”, it came out that gender asterisk (as in friends), colon (as in friends) and underscore (as in friends) were replaced by the official rules are to be dealt with in a “Special Characters” section in the future.
“Grammar Problems”
The chairman explained: “These usually include paragraph and percent signs, which are characterized by the fact that they are not punctuation marks in the narrower sense.” These signs, according to Josef Lange, “are not part of the core of German orthography”. He explained the role of the gender sign: “They are supposed to convey through metalinguistics that all gender identities are meant by it.” In a number of cases, however, their use leads to subsequent grammatical problems. And this is what the grammarians and linguists say: “The consequences have not yet been clarified. We have to continue to monitor that.”
The consequences of the unanimously accepted new recommendation for the social and political dispute remained unclear. The Osnabrück professor of German studies Peter Schlobinski, a luminary of his guild, who was interviewed by WELT, admitted after the press conference: “It didn’t become very clear to me.”
But Schlobinski was sure relatively quickly: “Everything will remain as it is for the time being. Except for the fact that these characters are included as special characters.” The council now wants to discuss its recommendation with interest groups of parents and teachers. The results of these talks will be announced in December. All of this will only become official after a decision has been made by the Conference of Ministers of Education.
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The concern of some parents, pupils and students that in the future it will be punished as a violation of the rules if someone does not change is unfounded. The Germanist Schlobinski, who repeatedly limited his remarks with the sentence “If I understood that correctly”, was at least fairly certain about this: “It cannot be that someone is graded negatively if he does not use this form.” He himself is also one of those who consider Genderstern etc. to be problematic: “My recommendation would be to do without it.”
Examinees who claim that they got worse grades because they don’t gender make headlines regularly. This is usually difficult to prove and is regularly denied by the educational institutions.
However, the opposite is undisputed and obvious: there are teachers and lecturers who mark gendered forms as mistakes. In 2021, for example, Walter Krämer, statistics professor and chairman of the German language association, announced in the “Spiegel”: “I reject bachelor’s and master’s theses with gender asterisks. I expect that the rules of the German language are observed in academic papers.” At grammar schools there are teachers who count gendered forms as mistakes – often not just once, but several times. The usual practice is actually to count “repeated errors” only once as grade-relevant.
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Such an uncompromising attitude may seem unsympathetic, but so far the gender rejecters have been able to claim that they are acting in accordance with the official spelling rules. The Saxon Ministry of Culture also referred to the official German orthography regulated by the Spelling Council when it recently reaffirmed the ban on so-called gender-equitable language in schools in the state and made it clear that this taboo also applies to cooperation partners.
The German Spelling Council and its expertise are still relatively unknown. Since the reform of 1996 came into force, correct spelling is no longer determined by the Duden – or the “Dud:in”, as the dictionary is also mockingly called because of the gender zeal of its editors – but by an official set of rules. The spelling board is responsible for this. Of its members, 18 come from Germany, nine each from Austria and Switzerland and one each from the Principality of Liechtenstein, from the autonomous province of Bolzano-South Tyrol and from the German-speaking community of Belgium. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is co-opted with a non-voting member.
The Council was installed in 2004 to restore “spelling peace”. A number of radical elements of the original spelling reform were withdrawn at the time. To put it simply (the debates and fronts were confusing), a compromise spelling was found under the aegis of the council, with the help of which the uniform German orthography could be preserved.
This is legally binding in Germany. For example, public administration documents must be written in it, as Josef Lange emphasized again at the press conference. The politicians’ tinkering with the language in the name of “gender justice” also raises the interesting question of the extent to which gendered legal texts would still be valid.
Ein Polyjargon
In any case, the position of the advocates of gender, who want to introduce political jargon as the standard for official and public language in Germany, has not been strengthened by the Council decision. And one political jargon is gender: those who change are thus certifying their progressiveness, their adherence to feminist principles and, in general, their affiliation with the camp that, until recently, believed they had achieved undisputed cultural hegemony. The question of whether an asterisk, colon or underscore is the best orthographic gender practice is basically just the question of the best party badge of the political camp described. It is not the task of a politically neutral authority to decide on this, as the spelling council should be.
In any case, those who want to stick to the tried and tested are not under pressure to justify themselves. Arguments must be brought by those who want to change the language norm that has been developed transnationally in a grassroots democratic way over 1000 years through power-based interventions. And then they have to demonstrate two things convincingly. First, they must demonstrate that the past practice of the generic masculine does in fact hinder equality. And secondly, they have to prove that the new forms they want are suitable for overcoming the assumed linguistic oppression of “German as a male language” (the title of a book by Luise F. Pusch). So far they have not been able to do either.
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It is unclear whether the recommendation of the spelling council will undermine the previous arguments of the Saxon Ministry of Education and other authorities, which reject gender language with reference to the official set of rules. One can predict that this will remain a subject of political as well as legal disputes.
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