While some adults will likely spell the way they always have, German students will be obliged to learn the new rules, which, among other things, govern the use of the German letter that stands for a double "s," ß.

Rules for some foreign-language nouns are now also set in stone - and not, as they were before, seemingly arbitrary. A number of words have been "Germanized," including as "Grislibaer," (grizzly bear) and "Ladys," (ladies).

Still, two of the 16 federal states, Bavaria and Northern Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s two largest states, with 13 and 18 million inhabitants respectively, have both extended the period during which the old rules are acceptable for school children and government officials by one year, although the new rules are already being taught in some public schools.

It’s been a long time coming for the spelling reform, which was initiated in 1987 when federal and state culture officials first charged the Institute for German Language with creating easier spelling rules. Germany’s state culture ministers agreed upon a final set of proposed orthographic changes in 1995.

Since 1998, the new rules have been mandatory for schools, but text in the old spelling was not to be marked as wrong until August 1, 2005. The rest of the country was given until this week to adapt to the rules.

Still, there is a large enough part of the populace - and several important arbiters of German public life - to question the acceptance, if not the legitimacy, of the reforms. In 2000, the esteemed daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung bucked the new rules in favor of the old. Just a year ago, the Axel Springer Verlag also went back to the old system.

According to a study by the Allensbach-based Institute for Public Research, 61% of the German population rejects the reform, and 51% sees no use in following the new rules.

But the primary question weighing on many minds is whether this is really about some old dogs stubbornly refusing to learn new tricks - or whether the new spelling actually compromises the traditions of the German language. The German literati especially have been adamant about rejecting the new rules, with Nobel Prize-winning author Guenter Grass calling them a "superfluous and detrimental administrative attack on a living body of language."