Belarusian

Belarusian, spoken by 7 million people, is an official language in the Republic of Belarus. The language belongs to East Slavic languages and has 2 alongside linguistic rules (norms): modern one, or official, and “Taraskievica”, which was used at the beginning of the last century and now used only restrictively.

 Language characteristics

 Scientists divide the language into 2 main dialects: southwest and northeast, besides there are also a few transition patois. One of the most popular not only in spoken language but in journalism is “Trasyanka” which uses Belarusian phonetics and grammar rules with Russian vocabulary.

 Despite the general use of the Cyrillic alphabet, certain Belarusian groups outside the country use the Latin alphabet. In the history of the Belarusian language, there was a period of its translation into the Arabic alphabet by Tatars which, by the way, lived as a close-knit group in this country.

 If we start to compare Russian and Belarusian languages there are a few primary differences, such as “Ё” that can’t be replaced with “Е”, “И” doesn’t exist as a letter and “I” is used instead of it, “O” is used in words only as a vowel, otherwise it’s “A”. “Чы” shows its firmness, which is atypical for Russian. There are few more nuances, the number of which was even bigger before the reform of 1933.

 The literary language wasn’t recognized till 1917, because it was considered as a different type of patois or as a Russian language dialect and its development was restricted, although it gained a certain paper base in Belarusian.

 Nowadays the Belarusian language competes with Russian and according to the last widespread census the number of Belarusian-speaking people is more than half the population, however, only 6% of them use it at home in informal communication. Over time the number of people using Belarusian tends to decrease and government promises to change it in the near future.

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