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CHAPTER 1
Introduction to the 1996 Reform of German Orthography
On 30 November 1995, a press release by the German Standing Conference of Ministers for Education and Cultural Affairs – the Kultusministerkonferenz or KMK – announced that a reform of German orthography had been approved. The proposed changes were an attempt to harmonise what was perceived to be a complex and inconsistent set of orthographic rules that were causing unnecessary problems for language users of all ages, but for young schoolchildren in particular. The reform was to be introduced from 1 August 1998 to coincide with the start of the new school year, and this would be followed by a seven-year transitionary period until 31 July 2005, during which time the old orthography would be considered 'outdated' (überholt) but not 'wrong' (falsch). However, many Federal states or Bundesländer chose not to delay the implementation of the reform until 1998 and instructed schools in their area to begin teaching the new rules from the start of the school year 1996/1997.
The decision to reform German orthography had not been taken lightly. Given that the first and hitherto only set of official guidelines for all the German-speaking countries had been agreed in 1901, the final proposal for their revision in 1996 was the result of almost a century of often heated debate among linguists, politicians, educationalists, lexicographers, writers, journalists, and other interested parties. Nor was the 1996 reform an exclusively German affair. From the mid-1970s in particular there had been close liaison between what were then the four main German-speaking states – the Federal Republic of Germany, the German Democratic Republic, Austria and Switzerland – a process that was then facilitated by the unification of Germany in 1990. At various points there had also been input from representatives from Liechtenstein, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Italy, Romania and Hungary. On 1 July 1996, delegates from these countries (with the exception of Belgium and Denmark), together with German, Austrian and Swiss officials, met in Vienna to sign the so-called 'Vienna Declaration of Intent' (Wiener Absichtserklärung), thereby agreeing to implement the new guidelines.
Although the disputes surrounding state involvement in the standardisation of German orthography had never entirely abated since they first began in the mid-19th century, by the time the Vienna Declaration was signed in 1996, a new round of protest had already gathered momentum. In May of that year, Rolf Gröschner, professor of law at the University of Jena, and his 14-year-old daughter, Alena, took their case to the Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht – BVerfG) in Karlsruhe and, even though the Court rejected on a legal technicality their claim that the reform was at odds with the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz), their highly publicised campaign helped to fan the flames of what might reasonably be characterised as a traditional public antipathy to the idea of orthographic reform. In October of the same year, a group of eminent writers and intellectuals, including Günter Grass, put their signatures to a petition circulated at the annual Frankfurt Book Fair by the Bavarian school-teacher Friedrich Denk. This protest attracted considerable media coverage, culminating in a front-cover story by the German news magazine, Der Spiegel. In November 1996, Denk then went on to form a national 'citizens' action group' or Bürgerinitiative, entitled 'WE [the people] against the spelling reform' (WIR gegen die Rechtschreibreform), the aim of which was to topple the reform via a series of regional referenda (Volksbegehren). Later that same month, the then Federal President, Roman Herzog, famously dismissed the reform and the surrounding debates as about 'as much use as a hole in the head'.
In the meantime many parents had begun to challenge the reform in the regional courts. The first victory came in July 1997 when an administrative court (Verwaltungsgericht) in Wiesbaden accepted one parent's application for a temporary injunction against the reform, as a result of which the state of Hesse abandoned its plans to introduce the new spellings during the coming school year. It was a watershed ruling in the context of what was to become a major public and legal battle over German orthography that would continue for at least another three years. By spring 1998 some 30 cases had been heard in the regional courts, with just under half going against the reform, and in May of that year the issue was referred back to the Federal Constitutional Court for a final hearing. However, even when this court ruled definitively in favour of the reform in July 1998, and all schools and official authorities were instructed to proceed with its implementation, the popular protest continued. On 27 September 1998 – the same day as the national elections that saw the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl replaced by the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder – the electorate of one Federal state, Schleswig-Holstein, voted in a referendum to opt out of the reform. Having already introduced the new guidelines in 1997, schools in Schleswig-Holstein, the most northerly German state, then reverted to the old orthography, placing themselves in a somewhat isolated position with regard to the rest of the German-speaking area. However, it was a situation that would not – and probably could not – be tolerated for long in official quarters, and following the intervention of the regional parliament, the referendum result was overturned in September 1999, and schools in Schleswig-Holstein were once again instructed to teach the new spellings.
By the end of 1999, it began to look as though the disputes over the reform had more or less abated, the process of transition having been bolstered by the conversion to the new guidelines by the press on 1 August of that year (albeit, as we shall see in Chapter 3, to somewhat modified versions of the new orthography). However, in July 2000 – and just as I was about to begin writing this book – the issue hit the headlines again. One month prior to the publication of a new edition of the Duden dictionary, the Erlangen-based linguist and long-time opponent of the 1996 reform, Theodor Ickler, declared in an article in the conservative national daily, Die Welt, that some dictionaries were in fact being used as a vehicle for 'secretly withdrawing' various aspects of the reform (Ickler, 2000). Ickler was referring here to a number of revisions that had been made to the new Duden dictionary following discussions with the Mannheim-based 'International Commission for German Orthography' (Zwischenstaatliche Kommission für die deutsche Rechtschreibung), which had been set up in accordance with the Vienna Declaration. This commission, whose short-term remit was the monitoring of the reform's introduction, but which in the longer term would oversee any further necessary amendments to German orthography, had been compelled to deal with the differing representations of the new orthographic rules in a number of commercially successful dictionaries, notably the Duden and its main rival Bertelsmann. Either way, so incensed by Ickler's claims was another long-time opponent of the reform, the conservative newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), that this paper unilaterally declared its reversion to the old orthography, a decision that, up to the time of this book's publication, has not been revoked.
By 2001 it began to look as though the dispute over German orthography had finally run its course, not least following what was to be the final legal ruling on the matter. This came in June of that year when the upper administrative court in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, ruled that the 12-year-old daughter of Gabriele Ahrens – the latter, one of the key figures in the national citizens' initiative against the reform – should no longer be taught the old orthography in accordance with a previous ruling of the administrative court in Hanover but should, like all other pupils, learn the new rules for spelling and punctuation. However, popular dispute has certainly continued, and many anti-reform groups, such as the 'Organisation for German Spelling and Language Cultivation' (Verein für deutsche Rechtschreibung und Sprachpflege), founded in 1997, have continued to call for a reversion to the old orthography. Moreover, as we shall see in the course of this book, the status of the new orthographic rules following the end of the interim period in 2005 is by no means entirely certain.
In an historical survey of written German, Wolfgang Werner Sauer and Helmut Glück (1995: 69) declared: 'Orthography is boring. It is a subject for elderly folk who love order, vote Conservative, and always keep their dog on a lead.' Their heavily ironic comment, as they then proceeded to demonstrate, could not be further from the truth. Indeed the dispute over the 1996 reform of German orthography provides ample evidence that the group of those who do not find such issues boring extends way beyond order-loving Conservatives who take their dogs for walks on leads. The question, however, is why? One purpose of this book is to try to answer that question by exploring a range of issues pertinent to it. At the same time I would particularly like to render this debate accessible to an English-speaking audience with little or no knowledge of German. However, before I can do any of this, I will say something about the theoretical positions that inform my particular approach to the topic.
Language Ideological Debates
In this book I propose that the 1996 reform of German orthography, together with the public protests it inspired, constitute a prime example of what Jan Blommaert (1999) has referred to as a language ideological debate. In the introduction to his edited volume of the same name, Blommaert (1999: 1–12) describes such debates as occurring in specific times and places where real social actors – or ideological brokers – have collectively disputed the nature and function of language. These ideological brokers – who 'for reasons we set out to investigate, [...] claim authority in the field of debate' (Blommaert, 1999: 9) – can then be said to have engaged in the production and reproduction of competing language ideologies, that is, 'sets of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use' (Silverstein, 1979: 193). At the same time, such ideological brokerage can be theorised in terms of 'bids' for authoritative entextualisation (Silverstein & Urban, 1996: 11), in other words, as concrete attempts to secure closure in a given debate, according to which a particular view of language would eventually achieve a naturalised, common sense status. Here we see how language ideologies represent not only perceptions of language and discourse, but perceptions that are themselves 'constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group' (Kroskrity, 2000a,b: 8). It is in this way that the concerns of language ideology theorists meld with those of critical discourse analysts, who are similarly concerned with hegemonic 'struggles to legitimise claims for the universality of perspectives, interests, projects, etc. which are particular in their origins' (Fairclough, 2003: 79). Moreover, as James Tollefson (1991) has argued, language policy and language planning – of which orthographic standardisation is one of many potential examples – can be seen as crucial areas of social life where struggles for hegemony are acted out in, and over, language as part of broader social struggles to maintain and contest dominance in social relations (see also Blommaert, 1996).
Writing at the beginning of the 1990s, Kathryn Woolard noted how: 'The topic of language ideology may be one much-needed bridge between work on language structure and language politics, as well as between linguistic and social theory' (1992: 236), a view which has since been widely acknowledged in some, though not all, quarters of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (more below). However, Blommaert's point of departure for the analysis of language ideological debates is his contention that, while there is now a substantial literature on language ideology generally (see inter alia Joseph & Taylor, 1990; Kroskrity, 2000a; Lippi-Green, 1997; Milroy & Milroy, 1999; Schieffelin et al., 1998), and historians of language have similarly touched upon related issues: '[...] the historiography of language ideologies is something that remains to be constructed' (Blommaert, 1999: 1 – emphasis in original). For, in any attempt to understand how and why some views of language gradually emerge as dominant, while others are suppressed and marginalised, we need to attend to the historical processes that inform the dynamics of social power as these obtain in particular times and places (see also Blommaert et al., 2003; Kroskrity, 2000). This is because, as Blommaert emphasises:
[...] ideologies do not win the day just like that, they are not simply picked up by popular wisdom and public opinion. They are being reproduced by means of a variety of institutional, semi-institutional and everyday practices: campaigns, regimentation in social reproduction systems such as schools, administration, army, advertisement, publications (the media, literature, art, music) and so on [...]. These reproduction practices may result – willingly or not – in normalization, i.e. a hegemonic pattern in which the ideological claims are perceived as 'normal' ways of thinking and acting [...]. (Blommaert, 1999: 10–11 – emphasis in original)
Central to the historiographical approach advocated by Blommaert, then, is the rejection of an idealist view of language that treats ideational phenomena such as attitudes and ideologies as something that language users merely 'have', since this results not only in the de-historicisation of such phenomena, but also the mystification of the power processes underpinning them. Instead, Blommaert argues for a particular type of materialist view of language, that is, one that entails:
[...] an ethnographic eye for the real historical actors, their interests, their alliances, their practices, and where they come from, in relation to the discourses they produce – where discourse is in itself seen as a crucial symbolic resource onto which people project their interests, around which they can construct alliances, on and through which they exercise power. (Blommaert, 1999: 7)
This Bourdieu-inspired approach – where the social functions and meanings of language are actively constructed, negotiated and contested (Bourdieu, 1991; Heller, 1994) – allows the theorist, in turn, to transcend mainstream perceptions of attitudes and beliefs as the possession of individuals, and to expose the social and political contingency of ideational phenomena, thereby contributing to their demystification (see also Gal & Woolard, 2001a). It was against this theoretical backdrop that the contributors to Blommaert's collection went on to explore a range of debates on such seemingly disparate topics as the status of Ebonics in the USA (Collins, 1999), literary production in Tanzania (Madumulla et al., 1999), the 'Speak Mandarin Campaign' in Singapore (Bokhorst-Heng, 1999), translation in Corsica (Jaffe, 1999b), and the use of Castilian Spanish and Catalan at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics (DiGiacomo, 1999) (for review, see Johnson, 2001b).
Orthography as Ideology
A focus on orthography – literally the assumption that there is only one correct way of writing – lends itself particularly well to the kind of historical-materialist approach to language ideologies advocated by Blommaert. It is, moreover, in tune with an emerging literature within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology that emphasises the contingent nature of orthographic practices generally. For example, Mark Sebba (1998: 35–40) describes how the dominant view of orthography has traditionally been that of a neutral, technical accomplishment whose primary function is little more than the 'reduction of speech to writing' (see e.g. Lepsius, 1981 [1863, 1855]; Pike, 1947). Yet, drawing on Brian Street's (1984, 1993) now classic distinction between 'autonomous' and 'ideological' views of literacy, Sebba argues how an autonomous approach to orthography similarly masks the ideological nature of the choices made by real social actors in the creation and revision of writing systems. In his study of British Creole, Sebba (1998) then explores the ways in which a number of writers of Caribbean origin have tried to capture in written form a variety of speech for which there is no standard orthography. Especially interesting are the choices made by such writers in those cases where there is no phonemic motivation for adopting a spelling that diverges from that of the lexifier language, English, e.g. (tuff) (tough) or (dhu/duh) (do) (1998: 27). This suggests that Caribbean writers are opting for spellings that intrinsically construct a difference between British Creole and standard English as a way of highlighting their own distinctiveness from mainstream cultural practices.
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Excerpted from "Spelling Trouble?"
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Copyright © 2005 Sally Johnson.
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