2023-12-16 19:45:52
Opinion gender star decision
What official spelling says about gender is now more unclear than ever
Status: 18.12.2023 | Reading time: 2 minutes
Quelle: picture alliance / CHROMORANGE
The German Spelling Council has decided to declare the gender star and the internal colon to be “special characters”. At the same time, however, he warns of subsequent grammatical problems. As in the case of the unpopular spelling reform, a disaster is now on the horizon.
Who hoped that German Spelling Council would achieve in its meeting on Friday what this committee was actually established for in 2004 – namely: to maintain “spelling peace” – he was mistaken. Because with contradictory decisions on the special characters of the so-called “gender-equitable language”, the expert committee is now programming new political and scientific disputes.
On the one hand, after a meeting in Mainz that lasted more than six hours and was apparently marked by heated debates and personal attacks, the Council decided to include a passage in the official regulations that declares the gender star and the internal colon to be “special characters” – this means that they are officially mentioned in this document for the first time. On the other hand, according to initial reports from the closed meeting, the council members adopted a declaration in which – as before – they declared gender symbols to be obstacles to the readability, comprehensibility and translatability of texts.
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Debate about “special characters”
In the future, both opponents and supporters of gender will find arguments in the rules. This has implications in states such as Saxony and Bavaria, which have banned gender in schools or want to ban it there. The popular initiatives against gender that have formed in Hesse and Hamburg also rely on official spelling. What this says about gender is now more unclear than ever.
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Gendering and spelling
Especially since the new passage about the special characters says: “In various cases, their use can lead to subsequent grammatical problems that have not yet been clarified, for example in syntactic contexts when articles or pronouns are mentioned multiple times (the president).“
The Conference of Culture Ministers still has to politically approve the decisions of the Council, which includes representatives from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, South Tyrol, Belgium and Luxembourg. It would be the second time after the spelling reform in 1996 that politicians allow a supposed “optimization” of the German language that the majority of the population does not want. Neither the linguists, who see themselves as language engineers, nor the politicians have become any wiser as a result of the disaster that occurred back then.
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