All people should be addressed with gender-neutral language. The members of the Council for German Orthography agree on this. However, they do not recommend colons and asterisks.
The Council for German Spelling has not yet officially recognized the gender star. But the clear message to tolerate the special characters. The development is not yet complete and will continue to be monitored by the Council.
In a very controversial debate, that was all that could be agreed upon with the necessary two-thirds majority. In the end, nobody was satisfied. Josef Lange, the chairman of the Council for German Spelling, had hoped for more. “I would have promised myself a further result. With all good will, that was not achievable.” The discussion will certainly continue in the years to come.
question of translatability
The supporters of the asterisk or colon interpret the attitude of the Council as a sign that the gender special characters are already halfway to being included in the official regulations.
Heinz Bouillon, who took part in the debate on behalf of the German community in Belgium, is skeptical about the development. “The special characters represent a very special problem for us, namely translatability,” criticizes Heinz. Belgium has three national languages. Everything that is decided by authorities has to be translated. “But these special characters don’t exist in Dutch, nor in French. What happens to them? If something like that were accepted, the translation services would have enormous problems.”
Bouillon is one of Belgium’s most recognized experts in teaching and learning foreign languages. He believes that German as a foreign language could become unattractive if the gender star or other special characters were recognized. “I find that very difficult to market to my students. They immediately switch to Spanish and Italian.”
Krome: Grammar and sentence formation are impaired
The language has always changed and adapted to social developments, says Sabine Krome. But the managing director of the Council for German Spelling also warns against “adventurous neologisms with shortening special characters”. This often complicates the sentences and makes them seem contrived.
The special characters could also mess up the grammar and sentence structure, according to Krome. Word formation is disturbed by the word signs in the middle of the word, and plural forms are lost as a result. “If you take farmers, for example, that should include farmers and third gender identities. One may rightly doubt whether everyone understands that,” criticizes the managing director of the council.
discussion about group identities
The chairman of the Council for German Spelling, Lange, emphasizes that gender language must not be at the expense of the readability and comprehensibility of texts. Nor should one jeopardize the unity of the German-speaking area. “Because the use of these special characters is now common practice in certain groups, so it is constantly used and understood there.”
The question of whether the use of gender language in the German-speaking area splits language into different group identities is an open question. “I’m concerned that it could develop into that,” says Lange.
The top language guards agree that everyone should be addressed with gender-appropriate language. However, this is a task that cannot be mastered with changed spelling rules alone.
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 point in 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).