Problems of the judicial system reforming in Ukraine in the context of the language legislation optimization

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of raising the linguistic competence of civil servants, such as judges of all levels and jurisdictions. Language planning as a part of the state language policy is the subject to change in both the corpus and status, that leads to new challenges to reforming the judiciary in Ukraine. The role of the linguistic competence of judges, acting on behalf of the State of Ukraine, who should do it as correctly as possible, not only from the point of view of jurisprudence, but also in view of the perfection of linguistic means (which generally contributes to enhancing the authority of the court and its credibility), has not been yet an object of a certain scientific investigation.                               This determines the relevance of the proposed research. The purpose of the article is to find out the peculiarities of the formation of the judge linguistic competence, in particular the factors influencing its level, ways of its improvement and specifics of further evaluation. The updated language legislation stipulates that the future judge, as a public official, should have a good command of the state language, which must be confirmed by the appropriate state certificate issued by the National State Language Standards Commission. At the same time, the legal norm is to formalize court decisions in accordance with the standards of the state language, which have changed since the new version of the Spelling of the Ukrainian language came into force. The article provides the analysis of the specific cases of updated norms of modern Ukrainian literary language and the practice of their use in the work of judges, including the use of capital letters in the titles of the highest state positions and Internet terms, the variability of excellent endings of oikonyms, writing complex words with a foreign language prefix and more. Preparing for obtaining the certificate of the international standard on the level of command of the state language by representatives of the judiciary of Ukraine, outlining ways, forms and methods of its organization are perspective issues for further research.