LANGUAGE COMPETENCE OF ROMA CHILDREN UPON ENTERING TO SCHOOL

The Roma came to Europe from India as a strongly different cultural group (different socialization standards, clothing, language, music, temperament, faith, tradition and customs). The Roma have lived in the area of Slovakia for several centuries (the first known reference is from 1322); in some historical periods they were violently assimilated, could not develop their culture and language, carry on with their values and norms, and reciprocally influence the majority society. They were still able to preserve elements of their own ethnical identity (for example language) in such conditions. On the other hand, social exclusion influenced the growth of concentrated settlements, cross-generation reproduction of poverty and affiliated bad living conditions, and low level of education. In Slovakia, the statute of being a minority together with all its rights was acknowledged to Roma community only in the year 1991. Nevertheless, the vitality of this community, as described by Giles and Johnson (1987) in ethnolinguistic theory, has remained very low. The paper focuses on linguistic competence of Roma children from the socially disadvantaged, marginalized Roma community. The State Educational Programme in Slovakia defines socially disadvantaged environment (poverty or disadvantage culture) as environment, which given the social and linguistic conditions insufficient to stimulate the development of mental, emotional and self-control qualities of the individual, does not support the effective socialization and does not provide adequate incentives for the development of personality. Children who live in adequately stimulating environment and whose social environment can be evaluated as filling the cultural and socialisation norms of major society, gradually verifies the ontogenetic tasks. In the age of 6 years he/she is prepared to be educated in the school. Developed communication skill according to criteria used in school maturity tests: adopted learning language, appropriate word bank, ability to communicate with an adult, ability to follow communication rules (request, thank), ability to retell a short poem or a recently uttered complex sentence. But the totally different life situation is the situation of the child living in social exclusion in marginalised Roma community. Roma child cannot speak Slovak which is a school language. Even the native language causes problems because the Romani word bank is insufficient for the needs of communication at school. Language code is evaluated as limited (Bernstein, 1960), caused by lack of stimuli in environment; semantic network is weakly structured; and terms are not differentiated and insufficiently defined. The authors found the difference in vocabulary of the Roma and Slovak children starting school. The Slovak children from adequately stimulating environment acquired higher scores.