Spelling Reform
(http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/german/spell.html)
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Opposing State Court Rulings Highlight Continued Confusion over Spelling Reform [Week in Germany, Oct 24, 1997]
Kids in Lower Saxony will continue to eat Spaghetti and Ketchup for the time being, but next door in Hamburg it’ll be Spagetti and Ketschup as plans to revamp German’s spelling rules go forward. After courts in those two states came to very different conclusions, the debate over plans to reform German spelling returned to headlines this week. On October 17, Lower Saxony’s Superior Administrative Court ruled that plans to introduce new spelling rules into the state’s classrooms violate the law. That ruling prompted the state’s SPD government to announce Monday (October 20) that it would suspend implementation of the reform and order schools to return to the spelling rules long conventional when students return from their brief fall break in early November. The day after this announcement, Hamburg’s Superior Administrative Court refused to block the spelling reform, leaving the city-state’s schools free to teach the new rules until the Federal Constitutional Court addresses the issue.
The rulings in Lower Saxony and Hamburg follow in the wake of a series of divided decisions by state courts around the country late this summer (TWIG 9/5/97, p. 6). At issue is whether Germany’s sixteen state ministers of education exceeded their authority when they committed the country to the spelling reform plan an international group of linguists and educators first proposed in late 1994. Lower Saxony’s Superior Administrative Court, side-stepping that general issue, found that the state’s Ministry of Education acted to implement the spelling reform before the legal preconditions for doing so had been fulfilled. The Hamburg court, on the other hand, argued that although official action can serve to make linguistic changes the norm, the state cannot try to be “the motor of change” when it comes to language. Whether Germany’s state governments may go ahead with the spelling reform, the judges in Hamburg concluded, will have to be decided by the Federal Constitutional Court. That decision could come early next year, Rolf Wernstedt, Lower Saxony’s Minister of Education and current chair of the Conference of Education Ministers, speculates.
Wernstedt added, however, that he would like to see a “political solution” to the spelling reform debate, namely an agreement between Germany’s sixteen states and the federal union, represented by the Bundestag. The education ministers and state prime ministers are expected to consider such an agreement at their respective fall conferences.
ACADEMY PREPARING ALTERNATIVE TO SPELLING REFORM PLAN
Germany's unofficial guardians of the German language are betting that plans to revamp its spelling rules will fall through. On Tuesday (June 3), a spokesperson for the German Academy for Language and Literature (Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung) confirmed reports that the academy is preparing a less sweeping revision of German spelling rules than the one education officials in Germany, Austria and Switzerland are intending to implement over the next several years (TWIG 12/2/94, p.6; 5/9/97, p. 7). The academy has assembled a commission of linguists to clear up inconsistencies in German spellings on the basis of the pre-reform rules set out in the influential Duden series of dictionaries and usage manuals. Details of the revision plans are to be announced shortly by academy president Christian Meier. Despite criticism from some political figures as well as from within the German literary community, spelling reform advocates expect the new rules to become standard as planned. State Education Minister Rolf Wernstedt (SPD) of Lower Saxony, president of the Conference of Education Ministers, told reporters Wednesday (June 4) he and his colleagues do not intend to stop the spelling reform. The anti-reform sentiments recently aired in the Bundestag, Wernstedt suggested, are the result of misinformation (TWIG 4/25/97, p.6).
CABINET BACKS SPELLING REFORM
(Week in Germany, May 9, 1997)
Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the members of his cabinet are ready to toss away their old dictionaries. In response to a parliamentary inquiry, the cabinet gave its backing to the long-planned and now much-debated overhaul of German spelling rules late last month. The changes, the cabinet believes, offer a number of advantages to German-speakers. Spelling rules will be made more comprehensible and freed from a profusion of exceptions and special cases, and the gap between the written and spoken word will be narrowed . The cabinet noted in its response to the Bundestag that it had signalled its support for the spelling reform back when it signed a treaty with a dozen other nations pledging to implement the changes (TWIG12/2/94, p.6). That intention continues unchanged."
