Gender asterisk and underscore will not be regular language characters in German in the future either. However, the spelling council proposes an addition to the official set of rules in the special characters section, in which the problems are also named.
The Council for German Orthography does not classify gender signs as a core component of German orthography. The Council’s previous recommendations will not be rescinded, as the body announced at the end of its meeting in Eupen, Belgium.
However, the applicable official regulations should be supplemented by a corresponding section on special characters, which will be proposed to the state authorities for approval. In this supplement on the topic of special characters, the Council lists the genders in the middle of words with colons, underscores and asterisks.
The gender star “is not part of the core area of German orthography,” said council chairman Josef Lange in an interview tagesschau24. So there are still no regular characters.
The setting of the characters could lead to grammatical problems that have not yet been clarified. “On the other hand, the Council cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that gender symbols are being used in certain groups and institutions.”
Council monitors development
Of course, everyone has the right to be addressed appropriately and with respect. At the same time, gender-equitable texts must, for example, be translated into other official languages in a way that is understandable, legible and readable, legally unambiguous and as automated as possible, explained Lange.
The Council will continue to monitor developments. When he will deal with it again, he cannot say at the moment, says Lange. He suspects that the council will meet in three years with a new composition. The chairman could not say what the result would be.
Recommendations from 2021 remain in place
Most recently, in 2021, the Council recommended not including asterisks, underscores, colons or other forms for identifying multi-gender designations in the middle of the word in the official regulations at this time. Now it would still not be recorded regularly, but described as a phenomenon in the area of special characters.
The Council is an important authority on spelling. His task on behalf of government agencies is to maintain the uniformity of spelling in the German-speaking world and to further develop the spelling with a view to changing the language.
Wording of the decision of the Council for German spelling
“In its meeting on July 14, 2023 in Eupen, the Council for German Spelling decided on an amendment to the Official Rules for German Spelling, which will be submitted to the state authorities for approval after a public hearing:
special character
Typographic characters such as the paragraph sign (§), the percent sign (%) or the ampersand (&) are considered special characters. These do not belong to the punctuation or word signs and therefore not to punctuation in the narrower sense. They are characterized by a clear formal status, such as a predefined position in the sentence, in a list, among other things (e.g. §) in front of the paragraph number (§ 2 BGB)). The use of special characters is also subject to rules: typographical rules sometimes have the status of conventions, sometimes they are defined as DIN or other standards by the German Institute for Standardization (DIN), ÖNORMEN or the Swiss Association for Standardization (SNV). .
Orthographic characters such as the colon (:) – but without a following space (Bürger:innen) – or special characters such as asterisk are increasingly used in personal designations
, underscore (_), or other characters used inside words. These inner-word characters do not belong to the core of German orthography. They are intended to convey a metalinguistic meaning that goes beyond the formal language function to identify all gender identities – male, female, diverse: the students, the colleagues. They go beyond forms of abbreviation such as citizens, which are already covered by the official regulations.
The peculiarity of the intra-word symbols for marking a cross-gender meaning lies in the fact that they have a direct effect on the orthographically correct spelling of words. They share this property with some punctuation or word marks (internal brackets, apostrophes, hyphens, quotation marks), the internal use of which is described in the Official Rules. In the case of the special characters with a gender reference, however, a metalinguistic meaning is to be transported. In various cases, their setting can lead to subsequent grammatical problems that have not yet been clarified, e.g. B. in syntactic contexts for multiple naming of articles or pronouns (the President).