Indicator history

At the begining of 2011, three non-governmental organizations filed a complaint to the national equality body asking to find discriminatory the way the Roma ethnic group is defined in the Romanian language dictionary by referrence to a word that is no longer accepted at the official level in the region ("gypsy", in Romanian "tigan") and by referrence to a negative meaning of the word "tigan" that was not marked in the dictionary as representing a pejorative meaning of the term ("Epithet given to a person having bad habits"). In June 2011, the National Council for Combating Discrimination decided that no discriminatory attitude (intention to discriminate) could be found, but it recommended the Romanian Academy of Sciences to explicitly mark the pejorative meaning of the word "tigan" in the dictionary in order to avoid negatively affecting the Roma population. Following this recommendation, the Institute of Linguistic Studies "Iorgu Iordan - Alexandru Rosetti" responded positively to the request sent by a large number of Roma organizations to implement the NCCD recommendation and promissed to change the definitions from the dictionary. The new edition of the dictionary has not been issued, yet. 

Source:

National Council for Combating Discrimination, Decision No.230 of 15.06.2011, available at http://cncd.org.ro/files/file/Hotararea%20CNCD%20230_2011.pdf (accessed on 18.02.2012).

TVR, Petiţie pentru definiţia din DEX a cuvântului "ţigan" (Petition regarding the definition of the word "gypsy" in the dictionary), available at http://tvr.ro/articol.php?id=106798 (accessed on 18.02.2012).