Gender-appropriate language is becoming increasingly important in German usage. The city of Osnabrück now wants to delete it again.
Osnabrück – The Osnabrück city administration only introduced gendering last summer. Now the city council is rowing under the new mayor Katharina Pötter straight back. According to the Osnabrück online newspaper Hasepost.de, Pötter is said to have been against gender-equitable language as early as July last year, along with city treasurer Thomas Fillep (SPD).
However, her predecessor Wolfgang Griesert (CDU) voted for the controversial language variation – as did some other council members.
Now, however, gender asterisks will again be dispensed with in the future. According to current surveys, the old language usage is preferred by a large majority of the population anyway. This is also one of the reasons why the city of Osnabrück will follow the recommendation of the Council for German Spelling to refrain from using the usual forms of gender-appropriate language. Efforts should nevertheless be made to use gender-neutral language – but without gender asterisks, underscores and the capital I.
What is gender-sensitive language?
Gender-equitable language refers to language use that, in relation to personal designations, aims to ensure the equal treatment of women and men and also of all genders and to express gender equality in spoken and written language. All linguistic means are understood as personal designations, which refer to individual persons, to mixed-gender groups or to people in general in terms of their meaning (semantics).
(Source: Wikipedia)
The city of Osnabrück wants to overturn gender: the reason is a recommendation
The reason for the recommendation of the Council for German spelling is that gender asterisks and the like impede the comprehensibility, readability and translatability of texts and disadvantage people with little knowledge of German.
“As a service company, the city administration must make an effort to speak and write the language of the citizens instead of telling them how to speak and write. Such an authoritarian style is far from the city,” says an excerpt of the draft resolution from the most recent council meeting.
The end of the gender asterisk: the city of Osnabrück wants to abolish gender
This defensive attitude is open to the development of language based on the difference between gender (grammatical gender) and sexus (biological gender). It does not ignore the injustices in the reality of life in society, but does not assume any decision-making powers about how to deal with them linguistically, it goes on to say.
According to Hasepost.de, the bill has a good chance of being approved by the city council, since the mayor and leading local politicians from all parties are represented in the committee and “the required majorities have probably already been clarified”.
Motions against the use of gender-sensitive language have also been submitted in other cities. An application by the AfD to reinstate gender-sensitive language in Kassel* was rejected. A CDU politician described the attempt as “hypocritical”. (Luisa Weckesser) *hna.de is an offer from IPPEN.MEDIA.
