The German Spelling Council continues to reject the inclusion of the gender star or other gender-appropriate linguistic symbols in official regulations. According to the KNA news agency, this emerges from a document approved by a majority of the expert committee. According to information from participants, it says: “Special characters in words impair comprehensibility, legibility, readability and automatic translatability.” The Council also sees the “unequivocality and legal certainty of the terms and texts” at risk.
Gender-appropriate language: * : _ Gender-Fair Language: “Why not abolish ‘der,’ ‘they,’ and ‘that’?” Gender ban in Saxony-Anhalt: ✻ now a spelling error Gender ban in schools: “Educational policy should not destroy democracy”
The commission thus confirms its statements from 2021 and 2018. At that time, the board advised against the use of special characters such as gender asterisk, underscore and colon. In July 2023, the Spelling Council recommended that a supplementary passage be included in the official spelling rules, which states: “These word-internal symbols do not belong to the core of German spelling.”
However, there has recently been a growing number of voices in the expert committee in favor of accepting gender symbols. Among other things, they argued that these were not orthographic characters, but typographic characters. The spelling council is therefore not responsible for this.
Special symbols for gender are common in many places, but are inconsistent
Since 2004, the German Spelling Council has been the authoritative authority on spelling matters. It was founded by a resolution of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs and has 40 voting members from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Principality of Liechtenstein, the autonomous province of Bolzano-South Tyrol and the German-speaking community of Belgium. The “intergovernmental committee” includes linguists, journalists and a member of the Duden editorial team. Its mission is to maintain and further develop spelling uniformity in the German-speaking area. The German Spelling Council makes recommendations that generally must be implemented by government agencies.
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Special characters have become common in many schools, colleges and authorities. However, they are not used uniformly.
Bavarian Prime Minister Markus Söder (CSU) recently announced that he would ban gender in schools and administration. The new black-red government in Hesse also plans to renounce the gender issue with special characters in administration, schools and universities. It expressly refers to the recommendations of the German Spelling Council. Other federal states act differently.
The German Spelling Council continues to reject the inclusion of the gender star or other gender-appropriate linguistic symbols in official regulations. According to the KNA news agency, this emerges from a document approved by a majority of the expert committee. According to information from participants, it says: “Special characters in words impair comprehensibility, legibility, readability and automatic translatability.” The Council also sees the “unequivocality and legal certainty of the terms and texts” at risk.