German orthography reform of 1996
The reform was based on an international agreement signed in Vienna in July 1996 by the governments of the German-speaking countries—Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland.
[citation needed] Exempted from change are certain very common short-vowelled words which end in a single 's' (such as das, es), echoing other undoubled final consonants in German (e.g. ab, im, an, hat, -ig).
In the original 1996 reform, this included the capitalisation of some nouns in compound verbs where the nouns had largely lost their capitalisation when becoming a part of the compound verb, for instance changing eislaufen to Eis laufen ("ice running" = to ice-skate) and kopfstehen to Kopf stehen (to stand on one's head).
The initial proposals of this working group were further discussed at two conferences in Vienna, Austria, in 1986 and 1990, to which the Austrian government had invited representatives from every region where German is spoken.
In 1988, these two organisations presented an incomplete but very wide-ranging set of proposed new rules, for example, the phrase Der Kaiser ißt den Aal im Boot ("The Emperor eats the eel in the boat") would be written Der keiser isst den al im bot.
In 1993, the German ministers of education invited 43 groups to present their opinions on the document, with hearings held in the unified Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
It also preserved the orthographical distinction between the inconvenient homophones das ("the", or "that", relative pronoun) and daß ("that", conjunction, as in "She said that you came"), which introduce different types of subordinate clause.
The German ministers of education decided to implement the new rules on 1 August 1998, with a transitional period lasting until the 2004–2005 school year.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair (the largest in Germany) in 1996, Friedrich Denk [de], a teacher from Bavaria, obtained signatures from hundreds of authors and scientists demanding the cancellation of the reform.
Among the leading opponents were Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Martin Walser, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Walter Kempowski.
[11] On 14 July 1998, after one hearing on 12 May 1998, and involving only one teachers' organisation, the Federal Constitutional Court declared that the introduction of the spelling reform by the ministers of education was lawful.
[non-primary source needed] In the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, a majority of voters in a referendum on 27 September 1998 called for a return to traditional spellings.
[citation needed] In July 2004, the ministers decided to introduce some changes to the reform, making both the traditional and the new spellings acceptable.
They also formed a Council for German Orthography, "38 experts from five countries", representing linguists, publishers, writers, journalists, teachers and parents.
Taking the place of the existing international committee, the Council agreed unanimously to implement the uncontroversial parts of the reform, while allowing compromises on other changes: "writing compounds separately or as a single word, [on] the use of lower and upper case, punctuation and syllabification".
The spelling change is based on the international agreement of 1 July 1996, signed on behalf of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
The signatories for Germany were the president of the Conference of Ministers of Education, Karl-Heinz Reck, and the parliamentary secretary of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Eduard Lintner.
Instead, as mentioned above, the German Supreme Court ruled that the reform in the public schools could be decided by the ministers of education.
Thus, as of 1 August 2005, the traditional spelling system was to be considered incorrect in the schools, except that two of the German states, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, had both officially rejected the reform.
Schoolbooks and children's books generally follow the new spellings, while the text of novels is presented as the authors prefer.
However, Theodor Ickler [de], a Professor of German at the University of Erlangen, has produced a new dictionary that aims to meet the demands of simplification without the need to impose any new spellings.
