Belarusian culture: a mother tongue most people do not speak at home

Which language Belarusians claim and which they speak

The census of Belarus asks two separate questions about language, and in the censuses of 1999 and 2019 the two questions produced different answers. One asks for a mother tongue, the language a person considers their own. The other asks which language is normally spoken at home. In the 2019 census, published by the National Statistical Committee, 54.1% of the population named Belarusian as their mother tongue and 42.3% named Russian. On the second question the order reversed: 71.4% named Russian and 26% named Belarusian.

The first census of independent Belarus, in 1999, had shown the same split at a different scale. About 6,984,000 ethnic Belarusians, 85.6% of them, declared Belarusian their mother tongue, while about 3,686,000 citizens, 36.7% of the population, declared it the language spoken at home. A government study in 2009 put Russian at home at 72% of Belarusians and active use of Belarusian at 11.9%, with the rest speaking a mixture of the two known as trasianka. The same study found that 29.4% of Belarusians could read, write and speak Belarusian, and that 52.5% could read and speak it without writing it.

Britannica's entry on Belarus, revised in 2026, puts the number of people in Belarus who speak Belarusian at around seven million and states that Russian is more commonly used in education and public life. Its entry on the language gives the reason in one clause: many twentieth-century governments of Belarus had policies favouring Russian. The two languages are close. Belarusian is East Slavic, related to Russian and Ukrainian, with dialects that shade into both at the borders, and there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility among the three. That closeness is what makes a mixed speech like trasianka possible, and it is also what lets a person claim one language and live in the other without a translator in the house.

In a 2006 article Roy Medvedev compared the position of Belarusian in Belarus to that of Irish in Ireland. Adam Maldzis named the shared feature: official bilingualism in both countries, and a low real status for the language called the mother tongue.

Who claims the written language of the Grand Duchy

From the fourteenth century until 1696 the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included present-day Belarus, kept much of its administration in writing in a Slavic language. Britannica describes it as an older form of Belarusian, used as the official language of administration from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and its entry on the Grand Duchy says Ruthenian became the official language for administrative purposes, along with Latin. Wikipedia's article on the Grand Duchy calls the documentary form Chancery Ruthenian, close to the spoken language without being identical to it, and records that it absorbed Lithuanian and Polish words over time.

The name matters because the state itself is disputed. Historians in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine have argued for a long time over whether the Grand Duchy was essentially a Lithuanian state or a Ruthenian-Lithuanian one in which the Ruthenian culture played the central part. The Ruthenians of the Grand Duchy were the ancestors of both modern Belarusians and modern Ukrainians, so "Old Belarusian" and "Ruthenian" name the same documents from two positions in that argument. This catalogue records both names and adopts neither.

The period left Belarusian culture its earliest printed book. Francysk Skaryna, a native of Polotsk, translated the Bible into the vernacular and published it in Prague and Vilnius between 1517 and 1525. Under Soviet rule his work was undervalued; independent Belarus took him up as a figure for the language and for his humanism, and a Belarusian language society bears his name. Earlier still, the twelfth-century poetry of Cyril of Turaw is counted as the start of Belarusian literature, in writing that used Old Belarusian, Latin, Polish or Church Slavonic.

The standing of the language fell with the union with Poland. Polish and Catholicism became dominant among the nobility, and in 1696 Polish replaced Ruthenian as the official language, which was then barred from administrative use. The peasants went on speaking it.

How Belarusian was pushed out of the towns

When the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned at the end of the eighteenth century, Belarusian survived as the speech of peasants, small-town dwellers and part of the minor nobility in the east, and as the language of oral folklore. Wikipedia's article on the language calls the result the folklorisation of Belarusian culture. The Russian Empire then reversed the direction of pressure. In the 1840s Nicholas I prohibited Belarusian in public schools, and after the revolt of 1863 led by Konstanty Kalinowski, known as Kastus, the government reintroduced Cyrillic for Belarusian in 1864. The formal ban on publishing books and papers in Belarusian was lifted on 25 December 1904.

The Russian census of 1897 counted about 5.89 million speakers of Belarusian, then recorded as White Russian. The same census found that in towns of more than 50,000 people fewer than a tenth spoke it, and the towns spoke Polish or Russian. The modern Belarusian literature that followed wrote about villages, because the countryside was where its writers heard the language. Yanka Kupala (1882 to 1942) and Yakub Kolas (1882 to 1956) are the two names the modern literature starts from, and both wrote for Nasha Niva, a Belarusian-language paper published in Vilnius. Francišak Bahuševič had already appealed to Belarusians, in the revival of the late 1870s and early 1880s, not to forsake their language lest they pass away.

The cities moved further away in the twentieth century. Before the Second World War, according to Britannica, Jews made up more than half of the urban population of the Belorussian republic. The Holocaust and postwar emigration nearly removed them. Minsk was rebuilt after its near destruction in the war, and many of the republic's Russians arrived in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. By the 1955 to 1956 school year 95% of schools in the republic taught mainly in Russian, and Belarusian was left to rural schools and humanities faculties, regarded, in the phrase Wikipedia records, as an "uncultured, rural language of rural people".

Why Belarusian has two ways of spelling

Belarusian has two written standards, and which one a writer uses says something about the writer. The first was set out by Branislaw Tarashkyevich in a grammar printed in Vilnius in 1918, the same year the modern thirty-two-letter Cyrillic alphabet was defined. Soviet Byelorussia accepted it for state schooling in the early 1920s.

In 1933 the Soviet government replaced it by decree. The project appeared in the party newspaper Zviazda on 28 June 1933, the Council of People's Commissars issued the decree on 28 August and it became law on 16 September 1933. The stated reasons were that the older grammar kept "artificial barriers" between Russian and Belarusian and carried Polish influence. The linguist Jan Stankievič counted 25 changes and argued that they moved Belarusian morphology and syntax towards Russian, and the often-quoted name for the reform is "the Russification of Belarusian". A commission led by Yakub Kolas revised the rules again, and the version published in 1959 is the official standard, amended in 1985 and in 2008. The 2008 amendment, in force from 1 September 2010, brought some spellings closer to Tarashkyevich's system.

The pre-1933 norm survived among its users. It is known as Taraškievica, and its writers call it the classic orthography. It favours pronunciations that follow Polish where the official norm follows Russian, so that "plan" and "philosophy" are spelled differently in the two systems, and it has a separate letter for the hard g sound. The difference is formal enough that internet standards carry two separate tags, one for the 1959 academic norm and one for Taraškievica.

Belarusian has also been written in other scripts. Before the modern Cyrillic alphabet was fixed in 1918 it was also written in a Latin alphabet, Łacinka, which was used again for much publishing during the German occupation and appeared in simplified form on the metro map in the 2010s. Lipka Tatars wrote Belarusian in Arabic script, and Belarusian Jews wrote it in Hebrew letters.

How Russian took over the Belarusian classroom

The swing back towards Belarusian began before the Soviet Union ended. The Supreme Soviet of the republic passed a Law on Languages on 26 January 1990, planning a ten-year rise in the use of Belarusian, and the constitution adopted in 1994 made Belarusian the sole official language, with Russian described as the language of inter-ethnic communication. Opponents of the way the language law was carried out between 1992 and 1994 called it "landslide Belarusization".

The reversal was fast. In Minsk the share of first-year pupils taught in Belarusian fell from 58.6% in 1994 to 4.8% in 1998. In the referendum of 14 May 1995, Belarusian lost its position as the only state language, and Article 17 of the constitution, in the text as amended in 2004, reads that the Belarusian and Russian languages shall be the official languages of the Republic of Belarus. In 1999 about 17% of pupils attended Belarusian-language elementary schools, and in 2016 about 13%. By 2016 no university in the country taught in Belarusian.

The same pattern shows in broadcasting. In 2011 the state television package carried 35,302 hours in Russian and 626 hours in Belarusian, which is 1.7% of air time.

The state's position rests on Article 17, which gives the two languages the same status, and the presidential state of the nation address of 2014 said that losing the ability to speak Belarusian would mean losing a part of the country's history. The objection has been recorded several times. The Francišak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society has reported violations of the right to public services, legislation and schooling in Belarusian, and the United States State Department reported in 2016 on harassment of academic and cultural groups promoting the language. In 2026 the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Belarus wrote that "in practice the Belarusian language is subjected to systematic marginalization", and that violations against its users had increased since August 2020 "as authorities increasingly treat the use of Belarusian as a sign of political disloyalty".

Where Belarusian literature has been written and banned

For long stretches Belarusian literature could develop only outside Soviet control. After the eastern part of Belarus became a Soviet republic, a policy of Belarusianisation in the 1920s was reversed in the 1930s, and most of the leading Belarusian intellectuals were exiled or killed in the Stalinist purges. Until 1939 the literature developed freely only in the western lands held by Poland. After the German occupation several poets and writers went into exile and came back only in the 1960s.

War became the central subject after 1945. Vasil Bykaŭ and Ales Adamovich wrote about the occupation that, by the estimate of the time, killed a quarter of the prewar population, and Ivan Melezh wrote about the years before it. Bykaŭ and Uladzimir Karatkievich are credited with a revival of the literature in the 1960s. Svetlana Alexievich, who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, named Adamovich as "her main teacher".

Pressure on Belarusian-language writing returned in 2021. In August 2021 the Belarusian PEN Centre, the Union of Belarusian Writers and the Belarusian Association of Journalists were liquidated, and the Ministry of Justice applied to the Supreme Court to liquidate the Skaryna language society. The Belarus Free Theatre, founded in 2005 by the playwrights Nikolai Khalezin and Natalya Kolyada, performed in private apartments, and at least one performance was broken up by police special forces.

The visual arts had their own centre in Vitebsk. Marc Chagall was born at Liozna near Vitebsk in 1887, spent the years of the First World War in Belarus and founded the Vitebsk Arts College. Music ran along a different line from the literature, towards the cities. The folk-rock group Pesniary, formed in 1969 by the guitarist Vladimir Mulyavin, toured widely in Europe, and bands such as Stary Olsa have kept folk and folk rock going since. Researchers Maya Medich and Lemez Lovas reported in 2006 that independent music-making in Belarus had become "an increasingly difficult and risky enterprise". The state runs its own festivals, the Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk among them, and critics among Belarusian nationalists argue that most of them have nothing to do with Belarusian culture.

Which faiths and foods mark the Belarusian year

Belarus has no official religion. Article 16 of the constitution declares religions and faiths equal before the law, and adds that the relations between the state and religious organisations are regulated with regard to their influence on the traditions of the Belarusian people. A concordat of 2003 grants the Belarusian Orthodox Church a privileged status. In the census of November 2011, 58.9% of the population described themselves as adhering to a religion, and about 82% of those were Eastern Orthodox, mostly within the Belarusian Exarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. Roman Catholics are concentrated in the west, around Grodno, among Belarusians and the Polish and Lithuanian minorities. Both the Orthodox and the Catholic Easters are commemorated, and most Soviet holidays, Victory Day on 9 May above all, are still kept.

The religious map was once far more mixed. Jews were once about 10% of the population, reduced to a very small minority by the Holocaust, deportation and emigration, and the Muslim community is formed by the Lipka Tatars. The division between Catholic and Orthodox goes back to 1387, when Lithuania converted to Catholicism while most of the Ruthenian lands stayed Orthodox. A Greek Catholic church formed under Polish rule drew Orthodox believers towards Rome, and the Russian Empire returned the Belarusian Uniates to Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century.

Belarusian New Year celebrations in the villages keep the old Julian calendar, and the celebration in honour of the icon of Our Lady at Budslaŭ was inscribed by UNESCO in 2018.

Food follows the climate. Belarusian cooking is built on vegetables, pork and bread, usually stewed or slow-cooked. Rye is more common than wheat because the conditions for wheat are too harsh, and potatoes are among the main crops. A host traditionally greets a guest with bread and salt.

What UNESCO has listed from Belarusian villages

Most of what Belarus has put on UNESCO's intangible heritage lists is village practice, from the countryside where Belarusian kept its speakers. Three of the seven elements are on the list of heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.

The Kalyady Tsars rite belongs to one village, Semezhava in the Minsk region. It is a New Year celebration kept by the old Julian calendar, and UNESCO's 2009 inscription describes about 500 men taking part each year, seven of whom play the tsars in a folk drama called "Tsar Maximilian". A comic old man and old woman, played by a girl and a boy, work the audience, the tsars visit the houses of unmarried girls, and the procession goes on into the night by torchlight. The inscription recorded that the rite was popular with older residents and losing the young.

Straw weaving, added in 2022, is a household craft with a ritual side. Weavers make boxes, baskets, hats and toys, and also harvest wreaths and the pawuk, a diamond-shaped hanging structure of straw believed to protect a household from harm and disease. UNESCO records that most of the weavers are women and that men who weave tend to make containers, hats, ritual masks and sculptures in a spiral technique. The skills pass through families and also through art studios, craft centres and online teaching.

Dress draws on the same village crafts. Traditional clothes were made of flax or wool, each region developed its own ornament, and one early dress pattern is the ornament at the hoist of the state flag adopted in a disputed referendum in 1995. The flax behind that cloth was a long-standing crop; in the late Soviet period the Belorussian republic grew about a quarter of the flax of the Soviet Union.

The built heritage on the World Heritage List comes from the other end of society. The Mir Castle Complex was inscribed in 2000, and the architectural and residential complex of the Radziwiłł family at Nesvizh in 2005. Antoni Radziwiłł of that family wrote an opera, Faust. Belarus also shares two natural and scientific properties, Białowieża Forest with Poland and the Struve Geodetic Arc with nine other countries, and it holds six further sites on its tentative list.