Bürger*innen? Backlash as Berlin mayor refuses to use gender-neutral language

Berlin’s recently appointed conservative mayor has said he will refuse to use gender-neutral language in office, insisting he wanted to use a language “that everyone understands”.

Kai Wegner, who became mayor of the German capital last month, signalled in an interview with the Bild am Sonntag a readiness to dispense with gender-neutral language altogether in the city’s administration, although appeared to later backtrack after coming up against strong opposition to his remarks.

In the Bild interview, Wegner said: “I have yet to sign a letter in gendered language [gender-neutral language]. What’s important to me is that the administrative language is comprehensible. Everyone can speak as they like in private, but I want to speak the German that I learned in school and that everyone understands.”

Wegner justified his argument by emphasising the importance of ensuring that migrant newcomers to Germany, who are encouraged to learn German, did not find the language more difficult than it actually was.

“We expect that people who come to Germany learn German and in particular it shouldn’t be the authorities who make it unnecessarily difficult for them to do so,” he said.

After a backlash, in which critics called his reasoning disingenuous, he qualified his remarks in an interview for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, in which he insisted he was not planning a general ban on gender-neutral language in the city hall.

“I am interested in having a language that is understandable,” he told the newspaper. “Everyone is free to speak as they like, but I for one will continue to write as I learned to do in school. For this reason I have not and will not sign a letter sent from my senate chancellery in gendered language.”

This is arguably more complicated than it would be in English because the German language genders words into male, female, and neutral.

According to traditional language rules, a male citizen is a Bürger, a female a Bürgerin. But when male and female citizens are referred to collectively or plurally, the generic masculine automatically applies and they are termed Bürger.

As a response to the outrage that has grown in recent years in particular over the use of the generic masculine, a gender-neutral alternative form of the language has been increasingly on the rise, in which, most commonly, the so-called gender star, an asterisk, is placed in front of the feminine word ending, for instance making Bürger*innen out of Bürger. The trend has its strong opponents, who complain it makes the language clumsy and difficult to pronounce.

But Johanna Usinger, one of the proponents of the alternative form who created an open-source online gender dictionary geschicktgendern.de (clever gendering) in 2015 to offer inspiration as to how to gender more correctly, eloquently and intelligibly, argued: “Our thinking is influenced through language. If it’s only the masculine that’s named, this conjures up a mental image which often contradicts reality.”

She said that ultimately, gender-neutral language was an expression of “democratic principle and behaviour” that “demonstrates an appreciation of everyone, regardless of their sex”.

A campaign against gender-neutral language has been backed in particular by the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), as well as Wegner’s party, the Christian Democrats (CDU).

The CDU arm themselves with the argument that generic masculine language did nothing to hinder the rise of Angela Merkel. Even though Germany’s constitution refers repeatedly to a Bundeskanzler or male federal chancellor, it did not stop her from rising to the position, as the first ever woman, they argued. The word Bundeskanzlerin (female chancellor) only came into common usage in 2004 during the election campaign that propelled Merkel to power, when it entered the prestigious Duden German language dictionary for the first time. Before then, the word had not officially existed.

However, lexical anomalies remained throughout her four terms in office, including the fact she operated from the Bundeskanzleramt or federal chancellery building, whose name suggests it is meant only for a man.