A ban on the use of gender-neutral language forms came into force in public institutions in the traditionally conservative southern German state of Bavaria on Monday.
Like many European languages, German has different masculine and feminine forms for some nouns, and in the past used the masculine plural as the all-inclusive default form. For example, "Autor" is the word for a male writer, and "Autorin" a female writer. The plural forms are "Autoren" and "Autorinnen." "Autoren" was previously used to mean "writers," not just male writers.
Some have argued that "Autoren" is grammatically masculine and therefore inherently excludes female writers, and more controversially non-traditional gender expressions. They therefore prefer to combine the two forms with a symbol, like an asterisk, slash, colon, underscore or internal capital letter to give: Autor*innen, Autor/innen, Autor:innen, Autor_innen or AutorInnen.
One alternative without a symbol is to write both forms with and: "Autorinnen und Autoren."
Traditionalists, like those in Bavaria, reject these changes as unnecessary. From now on, the use of these forms is expressly prohibited in schools, universities and public authorities in the state.
The General Rules of Procedure (AGO) for the authorities in Bavaria now stipulates: "Multi-gender spellings using internal word symbols such as the gender asterisk, colon, underscore or interpoint [·] are not permitted."
The Cabinet approved the controversial regulation on March 19 and on Thursday, the state government published the amendment in the Law and Ordinance Gazette.
The German Spelling Council had recently recommended against the use of special characters inside words in its resolution of December 15, 2023, pointing out that these are interventions in word formation, grammar and spelling that can impair the comprehensibility of texts.
However, the ban was sharply criticized by the Greens, political university groups, trade unions, queer associations and the Federal Student Conference, among others.
According to the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior, the consequences for those who disregard the ban will be decided on a case-by-case basis.
"Whether or when the threshold of misconduct relevant under disciplinary law in the sense of a breach of official duty is exceeded in a specific individual case will have to be assessed in particular with regard to the frequency, extent and respective context," a ministry spokeswoman said in response to an enquiry.
For example, it makes a difference whether it is an internal or a public letter and whether the gendered language is used once or several times in a prohibited manner.