During the 7^th International Conference on Romani Linguistics in Sofia Yaron MATRAS discusses the possibility of an electronic dictionary of Romani with Peter BAKKER and Dieter W. Halwachs. Staff of the Open Society Institute (OSI) / Budapest, who also participate in the conference, show interest in this idea and signal that the OSI would support a pilot project to develop such an electronic dictionary of Romani.

ROMLEX – the Romani Lexicon Project, coordinated by Yaron Matras, Dieter W. Halwachs and Peter Bakker, starts with a grant from the OSI to the University of Graz. Based on the Romani online-translators of the Graz Romani Project, the structure of ROMLEX is developed.

The expansion of ROMLEX is made possible by a grant of the OSI to the University of Manchester. During this phase 16 Roma trainees from 11 different countries are actively involved in project tasks in Manchester (2) and in Graz (14). During this first intensive working phase existing dictionaries, glossaries, word lists, etc. are integrated into ROMLEX and the ROMLEX website goes online.

The further expansion of ROMLEX is made possible by a grant of the OSI to the University of Graz. This second intensive working phase sees the elicitation of basic vocabulary of individual Romani varieties with the help of custom-made word lists. Furthermore, during this working phase first attempts are made to document the lexical outcomes of the functional expansion of Romani into formal domains.

From 2000 to 2008 ROMLEX has continuously been co-funded by the Austrian Federal Chancellery's Minority Promotion. In this time period the individual project tasks have been accomplished by the Graz Romani Project (Dieter W. Halwachs et al.) and the Manchester Romani Project (Yaron Matras et al.) in co-operation with the Departments of Linguistics at Aarhus University (Peter Bakker et al.) and the Charles University in Prague (Viktor Elšík et al.), as well as other academic and non-academic organisations, i.a. Roma NGOs working in the field of Romani, minority languages and language politics.

The harmonisation of lexical coverage as well as inter- and intra-dialectal linking of basic vocabulary of ROMLEX is funded by a three years grant (P20756-G03) of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) to the University of Graz. This phase of the project is co-ordinated by Dieter W. Halwachs with the assistance of Barbara Schrammel and Astrid Rader, while Peter Bakker, Viktor Elšík and Yaron Matras act as advisers.