Is this for real? I can’t draw no other conclusion than US defaultism in trans activism gives a free pass to TERF politics in Europe. This kind of news from Germany cannot mean anything good.
According to Wikipedia:
In 2019, the German Language Association VDS (Verein Deutsche Sprache; not to be confused with the Association for the German Language Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache, GfdS) launched a petition against the use of the gender star, saying it was a “destructive intrusion” into the German language and created “ridiculous linguistic structures”. It was signed by over 100 writers and scholars.[11] Luise F. Pusch, a German feminist linguist, criticises the gender star as it still makes women the ‘second choice’ by the use of the feminine suffix.[12] In 2020, the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache declared Gendersternchen to be one of the 10 German Words of the Year.[13]
In 2023, the state of Saxony banned the use of gender stars and gender gaps in schools and education, which marks students’ use of the gender stars as incorrect.[14][15] In March 2024, Bavaria banned gender-neutral language in schools, universities and several other public authorities.[16][17] In April 2024, Hesse banned the use of gender neutral language, including gender stars, in administrative language.[18]
Here are the original Wikipedia references
- “Der Aufruf und seine Erstunterzeichner”. Verein Deutsche Sprache (in German). 6 March 2019. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
- Schlüter, Nadja (22 April 2019). ““Das Gendersternchen ist nicht die richtige Lösung””. Jetzt.de (in German). Retrieved 5 April 2020. “GfdS Wort des Jahres” (in German). Retrieved 13 December 2020.
- Jones, Sam; Willsher, Kim; Oltermann, Philip; Giuffrida, Angela (2023-11-04). “What’s in a word? How less-gendered language is faring across Europe”. The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
- “Schools in Saxony are forbidden to use gender language”. cne.news. Retrieved 2024-04-05.
I got into this rabbit hole from this news article
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The very same happens in French. The use of recently popular gender-neutral structures like “étudiant.e.s” is strongly discouraged in formal writing. The older “étudiant(e)s” less so but still not recommended.
What’s recommended is to either say “étudiants et étudiantes” or just use the masculine form as a group for both masculine and feminine forms, as has been the standard forever, and almost no one bats an eye at.
It’s not TERF, it’s not misogynistic, it’s just to make texts easier to read. It takes more time and effort to read a text full of those extra period/parenthesis characters, for very very little gain.
People wanting to write a text where they consider the sacrifice in readability worth it for the extra emphasis on gender inclusion still can; the police won’t show up. It’s just not standard grammar.
This always makes me wonder why isn’t the feminine that is all inclusive. It occurred to me it is because males would take offense to be called women, where (at least traditionally) this is not the case the other way round.
In german or french It is mostly because the female version is just the male one with an extra ending. I.e. händler / händlerin English would have something similar but the male as default is just the now. You dont say actress but actor
I think that would be a history/etymology lesson going all the way back to Latin. I haven’t studied Latin, but I think there used to be a lot more grammatical genders, but they were gradually merged into one another in languages with a Latin heritage.
Why the neutral gender got merged into masculine and not feminine is a good question. Maybe it was just because they were the most similar.
In French the masculine and neutral gender collapsed. That’s why masculine is a default. All neutral pronouns merged with the masculine due to sound shifts.
Because of how languages evolved. But my male neighbour still is a midwife.
Agreed. I think using the masculine as the default should be fine if everyone agrees that it applies to all genders in this context. I wouldn’t even mind if the feminine was used for this instead. It’s just for the sake of legibility.
Same in Dutch but ‘‘student(e)’’ is generally accepted.
There is no good way to use gender neutral language in German. The language works differently than English.
So people came up with workarounds like putting stars in nouns to include both forms of the word for male and female but German grammar does not work well with this. There is also no good equivalent to using “they” as a neutral pronoun.
People still are trying to figure out how to make German more inclusive but this isn’t easy.
Don’t be ignorant.
I 100% agree that it’s not perfect. Still, banning an attempt at being inclusive is clearly not about how impractical it can be. And even if it were, policing language is stupid 9 times out of 10.
This is a cultural thing. My wife has studdied German culture, particularly relating to their relationship with their language, pretty extensively and from what she says they are exceedingly resistant to changes to their general language at all. Hence all of the compound nouns for new devices instead of coming up with a new word. Apparently the cultural adoption of “Das handy” for cellphone was a cultural milestone since they actually used something new instead of trying to cram together “Mobile Wireless Vocal Communication Device” into one word.
If you police it it’s not a cultural thing. If it was just a cultural thing than we could just let the * slowly die out. But banning language hinders progress. And I’m sorry, but the German language is constantly shifting and changing. There have even been multiple planned changes that went pretty well in recent history. Using English words might have been a big change back then, but now it’s really common. The first terms for mobile were things like “Taschentelefon” (pocket telephone), “drahtloses Telephone” (wireles telephone) or the one that is still in use “Mobiltelefon” (mobile phone). None of these seem outlandish to me.
I know nothing about german but some languages don’t even have neutral pronouns, even things have gender. In this case you either invent a new word or let it be.
I am pretty sure gender norms, even strict ones, occur to grammatically genderless languages, like Hungarian IIRC. So if a Hungarian student used a ‘*’ to be non-binary inclusive, this could not have meaning in this society, because their language is genderless? I doubt it.
Sorry i don’t get it. As I said you can use but you would have to invent a new word or just try to use some other word with non related meaning. For exemple dome languages without neutral words will use the male pronoun as the norm when talking about man and women together. I’m trying to say just accept this as women have done for centuries
I have no opinion mostly bc I didn’t read the whole thing) but I think its funny how “over 100 writers and scholars” isnt the impact it used to be. U can get 100 ppl to sign just about anything, especially in today’s day and age when it’s so easy for ppl to find other ppl with the same exact prejudices
Good point
I don’t know what a gender star is, but it sounds cool
Let’s take the word “Kassierer”, which is German for cashier. Kassierer is the male form, Kassiererin is the female form.
The idea of the Gendersternchen is that you write Kassierer*in to indicate that it means either male or female. I believe “Sternchen” (“little star”) translates to asterisk.
It denotes all genders not only male and female by using the asterisk as a wildcard for everything that could be in between the ends of the spectrum from male (Kassierer) to female (Kassiererin).
