Introduction

Hello everyone! Today we’ll talk about Belarusian, a Slavic language spoken in Belarus, Russia, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine. Belarusian is similar to Russian, Ukrainian and Rusyn and shares similarity with Polish. In spite of being declared as a native language of a few million people, the language is itself barely used nowadays in Belarus. Further I’m going to talk about it with you my fellow reader. So, let’s begin!

Who am I?

My name is Danila Emelyanov and I’m an author of the LEHF project. I’m keen on learning languages and programming. My goal is to become a polyglot one day :)

What’s up with Belarusian?

Actually, the Belarusian language had its acsendings and descendings in terms of language popularity and usage. Language has experienced significant reforms that not always were met with enthusiasm. During the Soviet age, current official standard (наркамаўка) was implemented. Before that innovation, classical standard (тарашкевіца) created by Belarusian linguist Branisłaŭ Taraškievič was in common use. This also was broadly used in the most of printing in Belarus and abroad. New standard has simplified orphography and russified vocabulary (don’t confuse it with a mixture of Belarusian and Russian (трасянка), being that it’s a different thing). Throughout the time usage of the language was gradually reducing, Russian took up the dominant position among Belarusians. Amount of use in cities has virtually decreased.

One language, three writing systems

That being said in the header right above this sentence, during different time three scripts were used. Nowadays, Cyrillic and Latin scripts are used, wheres the third one - Arabic has completely attrited. Remarkably, Arabic script had been used by Tatars, living in Belarus, up to the XIX century. Yes, I was baffled as well when I firstly heard about this. Latin script is used less than Cyrillic, although I know there are some signboards, written in both Cyrillic and Latin in Minsk, Belarus. Moreover, I periodically see Latin (лацінка) on the Internet by who live abroad. Speaking of Cyrillic, you’ll see it used in majority of cases.

Why are there so many standards?

For the long time, Belarusian didn’t have a standardised norm right up to the beginning of the XX century. Right before proclaiming Belarusian People Republic in 1918, a belarusian linguist Branisłaŭ Taraškievič invented the first official norm, which was called taraškievica (тарашкевіца) after him. However, his norm hasn’t retained its official status for so long, because in the first half of XX century in 1934 Soviet figures implemented a new bunch of rules, more of close to Russian norms, due to continueing russification in USSR. But taraškievica (classical Belarusian) wasn’t forgotten at all, Belarusian immigrants percieved this innovation with hostility and continued its using despite new norm. After Belarus gaining independance in 1991, classical norm returned to life of Belarusian speakers in the country and this is used alonside the official (наркамаўка, narkamaŭka) one. Not many people aware of existing the third form (dziejasłovica, дзеясловіца) which was created as a compromiss between classical and official standards. As far as I know, nobody really use it.

You mentioned the colloqual mixture of Belarusian and Russian, what is it?

Due to swift russification conducted during Soviet times, a new form of language (trasianka, трасянка) emerged. Some people started to use both Belarusian and Russian words in their speech, either due to code-switching or not knowing Russian well, so speakers basically filled the blanks with Belarusian words. Albeit nowadays this phenomen is not very welcomed and take place in everyday’s life of some people at the same time. Trasianka is also used in satire.

Are you learning Belarusian?

Yes, I’ve been learning it for a while and already can converse in it somewhat :) I really like this language due to its interesting history and family ties with it. In turn, knowing Belarusian also helped me with comprehensing other Slavic languages, that I’m fond of too haha. My favourite words in Belarusian are вожык (vožyk, hedgehog) and знічка (znička, falling star). I like a hedgehog words because of me liking hedgehogs (hey, they are very cute!) and falling star because it’s such a unique separate word, manifesting the state of the object. For your information an ordinary star (as in whole) would be звязда (zviazda). One day, I really hope Belarusian to be a language, I’m fluent in.

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I really hope you liked this article. Pay attention to your regional languages and take care of youself. Да пабачэння! (da pabačennia, goodbye).