German paper readers want spelling reform ditched

BERLIN (Reuters) -- An overwhelming majority of German newspaper readers want controversial new spelling and grammar rules ditched, a mail survey showed Friday.

A lobby group against the new rules ran ads in eight of Germany's top newspapers last month calling for readers to vote by mail on whether they wanted the reform scrapped.

Over 98 percent of the some 71,000 readers who responded voted in favor of getting rid of it.

"This shows that the reform is against the will of the great majority of the population. The new rules are more complicated than the old," Friedrich Denk, a German teacher and one of the initiators of the vote, told a news conference.

The reform, which removes many spelling irregularities and cuts the number of rules governing the use of the comma, was introduced in schools in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in 1998 but only adopted by most newspapers a year ago.

Responding to charges that the survey was not necessarily representative, Denk pointed out that a recent opinion poll by the respected Forsa Institute found that 68 percent of respondents opposed the reform.

The influential Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily unleashed a fierce debate about the reform last month when it said it was reverting to the old rules after just a year.

The changes, agreed to at a conference in Vienna in 1996, have sparked debate among scholars and writers and prompted some parents to take legal action to protest their children being taught the new rules in school.

A transitional period up to 2005 has been set during which old spelling forms will not be considered incorrect but merely outdated. The culture ministers of Germany's 16 regional states have said they want to stick with the new rules.

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