THE FIRST USE OF THE ROMANI LANGUAGE IN GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS IN SLOVAKIA

The aim of the paper is to analyse the linguistic features of the Romani census materials from 2001, which represent the first official use of the Romani language in government documents in the Slovak Republic. Although just a particular set of texts will be analysed in the paper we believe that the census forms can be looked at in more general terms as reflecting the present possibilities of the Romani language to be used for the official administrative purposes. It can be assumed that the situation has not changed much during the last nine years which have elapsed since the origin of the census forms. Although the standardization of the Romani language was declared in 2008 and a set of particular books has been published (The Rules of Romani Orthography, The Textbook of Romani, The Conversational Lexicon of Romani Grammar) on this occasion, there is no special institution that would systematically care for the development of the Romani language, especially for its terminology.