Comment 24 for bug 559894

As discussed in gnome-bugs #666686 this is not a problem not in Empathy, but either in the spell checking library enchant or the dictionary provided with Ubuntu:

The same effect appears i.e in gedit and traces down as follows:
If you select "Deutsch" as language option (only available option in Empathy) it fails. This equals to locale "de". If you choose "Deutsch (Deutschland)" ("de-DE") spell checking works. In Empathy you have no option to choose "de-DE" as workaround.

Traces down to the following test:

~/dev$ enchant -d de-DE test.txt
~/dev$ enchant -d de test.txt
error: line 1: missing or bad word count in the dic file
Hash Manager Error : 4