Belarusian

Introduction

Belorussia Map Belarusian (also known as Belarussian, Belorussian, Byelorussian, White Russian, and White Ruthenian) belongs to the East Slavic group of the Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. The name derives from bel- "white" + rus "Russia." Its closest relatives are Ukrainian and Russian. According to Ethnologue, there are 6.7 million speakers of Belarusian in Belarus. It is also spoken in Russia and in the former republics of the Soviet Union, as well as in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. It is estimated that the total number of speakers of Belarusian worldwide is around 10 million.

Belarusian has a long and complicated history:

In the early 14th century, Belarus and areas of Poland were part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. An old form of Belarusian, heavily influenced by Old Church Slavonic, was used as the liturgical language.
In 1569, Poland took over the Duchy, and Polish became the dominant language. The use of Belarusian was outlawed in 1696.
When the Russians took control of Belarus in the late 18th century, Belarusian continued to be suppressed and the use of Russian became widespread. However, some literature in Belarusian appeared during this period.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, Belarusian was considered a dialect of Russian and called "White Russian" while Belarus itself was called " White Russia." Scholars considered Belarusian to be a mixture of Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Belarusian had no official status, and the country's elite used Polish and Russian. However, there was a heated debate about a need to revive Belarusian, reform the alphabet, use it in education, and purge the language of Russian and Polish words.
In 1933, Stalin attacked the language reformers and the purist movement, which aimed to remove Russian and Polish elements from Belarusian, by calling it "nationalistic." Since the breakup of the USSR , the use of Belarusian as the national language has again been promoted.
During the Soviet rule from the 1920s to the late 1980s, literacy increased but the percentage of Belarusian speakers in Belarus declined with the immigration of Russians into the republic and the emigration of Belarusians to Central Asia and Siberia. The number of Belarusian publications also declined, as Russian became more dominant. This period is also characterized by 'russification' of Belarusian which consisted of replacing Belarusian words of Polish origin with Russian words.
When Belarus became independent in 1991, the use of Belarusian was actively encouraged in government, the media, and education. Belarusian was made the national language of the new republic. For instance, all place names and personal names had to be renamed in Belarusian; civil servants were given five years to learn Belarusian, and in ten years it was to become the sole language of government and education. But this policy created too much of an upheaval and as the government aligned itself more and more with Russia, Russian was given an equal official status in 1995. Today, those who are aligned with Russia are discouraging the use of Belarusian and mandating the use of Russian which currently is more widely used in public life and in education than Belarusian, even though over 75 percent of the population consider Belarusian to be their first language.

Dialects

Dancing Belarusian forms a link between Russian and Ukrainian, with its varieties shading gradually into Russian and Ukrainian varieties spoken along its respective borders. It is usually divided into three dialect groups, all of which are mutually intelligible: Northeastern, Southwestern, and Central. Standard Belarusian is based on the Central dialect

.

Structure

Sound System

Women Vowels
Belarusian has 5 vowel phonemes /i/, /e/, /a/, /u/, /o/. The vowels /o/ and /a/ are distinguished only in stressed positions. Unstressed /o/ becomes /a/. The vowels /i/ and /e/ are also distinguished only in stressed position. In unstressed positions, /e/ becomes /i/.

Consonants
Belarusian has 38 consonant phonemes. Some of their characteristic features are listed below:

Most consonants come in two forms: unpalatalized (hard) and palatalized (soft). This distinction makes a difference in word meaning. Palatalization refers to a secondary articulation whereby the body of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate during the articulation of the consonant.
There has four affricates /ts/, /dz/, /tsh/, /dzh/.
The language allows a variety of consonant clusters.

Stress
Stress can occur on any syllable of a word.

Click here to listen to some common phrases in Belarusian.

Grammar

Classroom

festival

small girl

The grammar of Belarusian is quite similar to that of Russian and Ukrainian.

Nouns
Belarusian nouns have the following features:

two numbers (singular and plural), there are also a few vestiges of the dual number;
three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter);
seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, prepositional, and a few instances of the vocative case)
nouns denoting animate beings have special endings in the accusative case;
three declensions;
there are no articles; definiteness-indefiniteness is expressed by demonstrative pronouns, word order, or intonation.

Adjectives
Adjectives are marked for gender and case only in the singular; in the plural they are marked only for case. Adjectives and possessive and demonstrative pronouns precede the nouns they modify and agree with them in gender, number, and case.

Verbs
Belarusian verbs have the following features:

two conjugations (first and second);
three persons (first, second, third);
two numbers (singular and plural), with some vestiges of dual;
three genders (only in the past tense);
three tenses (present, past, future);
two aspects (imperfective and perfective);
four moods (indicative, imperative, conditional, hypothetical);
three voices (active, middle, and passive).

Verbs agree with their subjects in person, number, and gender (in the past).

Belarusian perfective verbs are formed mostly by prefixation, just like in Russian and Ukrainian. The aspectual system is complex enough to have occupied and frustrated generations of linguists and learners.

Verbs of motion constitute a special subcategory of Belarusian verbs. These verbs are characterized by a complex system of directional and aspectual prefixes and suffixes.

Word order
The neutral word order in Belarusian is Subject-Verb-Object. However, other orders are also possible because inflectional endings make grammatical relations and roles in the sentence sufficiently clear. Like Russian and Ukrainian, Belarusian is a topic-prominent language. This means that word order is principally determined by topic (what the sentence is about, or old information) and comment (new information). Constituents with old information (topic) precede constituents with new information (comment).

Click here for more details on Belarusian grammar.

Vocabulary

Up to two-thirds of the modern Belarusian lexicon is based on common Slavic roots shared by the other Slavic languages. The rest of the words were borrowed from other languages, mostly from Greek and Latin, and to a lesser extent from Polish, French and Russian. In recent years, English has become the main source of borrowing.

Belorusian Phrases

Here are the numbers 1-10 in Belarusian Cyrillic and Latin scripts.

Writing

For most of its history, Belarusian was a battleground between two competing writing systems: the Latin and the Cyrillic.

From the 13th through the 18th century Belarus was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The official literary language was an old form of Belarusian written with the Cyrillic alphabet and heavily influenced by Old Church Slavonic.
The 16th century saw the adoption of the Latin alphabet called Lacinka. The earliest known printed Belarusian text appeared in 1642. It was printed in the Latin alphabet.
By the end of the 19th century, Belarusian, written in the Latin alphabet once again assumed the role of a literary language. Attempts to unify the writing system failed, and Belarusian proceeded to be written in both the Latin (Lacinka) and the Cyrillic alphabets. This situation continued through the early part of the 20th century.
After Belarus gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, there have been efforts to revive the use of the Latin alphabet. Unfortunately, there has been no agreement on a standard orthography.

Below are the two versions of the Belarusian alphabet. The order of the letters is different in the two alphabets.

Belarusian Alphabets

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Belarusian in Cyrillic and Latin alphabets.

UDHR Belarusian

Resources

Click here to find out where Belarusian is taught in the United States.
Click here to find teaching materials for Belarusian.

Resources for the study of Belarusian language and culture
The Belarusian Language
North American Association for Belarusian Studies
UCLA Language Materials Project: Belarusian Profile
Ethnologue entry for Belarusian
Wikipedia article on Belarusian
Pravapis
Online grammar of Belarusian
The Belarusian Language
Yamada Language Center Belarusian Resources
BBC Country Profile: Belarus