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Belarusian Belarusian Citations Belarusian Links Select a New Language Number of Speakers: Approximately 10 millionKey Dialects: Northeast Belarusian, Southwest Belarusian, Central BelarusianGeographical Center: Belarus, northeastern PolandGENERAL INTRODUCTION Ten million people speak Belarusian in Belarus, the former Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic, and in northeastern Poland (230,000 speakers). There are Belarusian speakers in the United States (10,000) and Canada (2,280), as well.LINGUISTIC AFFILIATION Belarusian is a Slavic language belonging to a group of East Slavic languages which include Russian and Ukrainian. Slavic languages (with the Baltic languages--Latvian and Lithuanian) form a branch of the Indo-European language family. Other Slavic subgroups are South Slavic (Old Church Slavonic, Slovene, Serbian/Croatian, Bulgarian), East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian), and West Slavic (Polish, Czech, Slovak).LANGUAGE VARIATION Belarusian dialects can be divided into three groups: the northeast group, the southwest group, and the central group. Scholars (Wexler 1977) interested in the historical relationships among the dialects have proposed different divisions.ORTHOGRAPHY Belarusian has been written since the fourteenth century when it was used as the chancery language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The traditional alphabet is Cyrillic, which had been used for other Slavic languages since its development in the ninth century. In the early twentieth century, some reformers in the western part of the country favored a switch to the Roman alphabet because of the large Catholic population in the area who were used to that alphabet. The Roman alphabet was used along with the Cyrillic alphabet until the former was abandoned in 1912. The Roman alphabet was revived in Poland between the world wars and it continues to be used by some emigrant groups. The current Cyrillic alphabet differs minimally from the alphabet used for the Russian language.LINGUISTIC SKETCH Belarusian is a richly inflected language like other Slavic languages. Nouns which are feminine, masculine, and neuter are declined in three declensions (mostly feminine a-stems, masculine and neuter o-stems, and feminine i-stems). Adjectives are declined for gender and case but only in the singular; in the plural they are inflected only for case. Number (singular and plural) is distinguished as is gender by inflectional endings on stems. The six inflectional cases are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional.ROLE IN SOCIETY The Belarusian language was considerably affected by Soviet language policies from the 1920s until the end of the 1980s. The percentage of Belarusian speakers declined due to the immigration of Russians into the republic and the emigration of Belarusians to Central Asia and Siberia (where they usually became Russian speakers). The number of Belarusian language books and newspapers declined during the Soviet period. Since the breakup of the USSR, and the establishment of Belarus as an independent country, official policy toward the language of Belarusian has changed. As the national language, use of Belarusian is now actively encouraged in government, the media, and education. However, recent reports (September 1995) indicate that nationalists who are aligned with Russia are discouraging the use of the language and mandating the use of Russian.HISTORY In the early fourteenth century, the territory of modern Belarus and parts of Poland were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. At that time, Belarusian was used as the language of the church. After Poland took over the administration of the Duchy in 1569, the use of Polish gradually gained ascendancy until Belarusian was outlawed in 1696. When the Russians took control of Belarus in the late eighteenth century, Belarusian continued to be suppressed and the use of Russian became widespread. Although a substantial amount of belles-lettres and poetry were written in Belarusian during the nineteenth century, they were printed abroad. It was not until the attempted revolution in 1905 that restrictions on Belarusian were relaxed. Books, periodicals, and newspapers were published; these were not widely read as only a quarter of the Belarusian population was literate at the time.REFERENCES Bidwell, C. E. 1970. Outline of Bielorussian Morphology. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University Center for International Studies, University of Pittsburgh.Return to the list of language portals
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