Nils Langer (Bristol) p.5-35
2000 Issue 3
Abstract
The German spelling reform of 1998 generated an amazing amount of (mostly negative) reaction from the German public. Starting with a general overview of the nature of linguistic purism and the history of German orthography, this article presents a wide range of opinions of the spelling reform. The data is mostly taken from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, either in the form of newspaper articles or letters to the editor, showing that the reform is rejected by untrained linguists (folk) for various political and pseudo-linguistic reasons, which, however, have in common a fundamenal misconception of the nature and status of both orthography in general and the 1998 spelling reform in particular. This articles argues, therefore, that the vast majority of objections to the spelling reform is not based on linguistic issues but rather based on a broadly politically defined conservative view of the world.