Only the census formularies in Italian accepted

Ljubljana, 10 October - The Italian government decided that in the coming census in the bilingual Triestine region the formularies in the Slovenian language will not be considered as official documents. If the census formularies in Slovenian were recognized, they could serve as a basis for an enumeration of the Slovenian minority in the Triestine region, which is not what the Italian government wants. Thus the Italian government is backing its decision, writes Primorski Dnevnik. It stresses that the current decision is not only at odds with the practice established at the census of 1981, but also with the instructions delivered by the State Statistics Institution in which the total equivalence of the census formularies in both languages is established. The governmental decision was opposed by the Triestine County on the grounds of the cost of the work necessary to transfer the data from one type of the formularies to the other one.