Belarusian

How Belarusian lost its sole official status

A law on languages passed in 1990 set out to raise the use and prestige of Belarusian over ten years, and the 1994 Constitution of Belarus made it the sole official language, with Russian as the language of inter-ethnic communication. A referendum on 14 May 1995 ended that exclusive status, and constitutional changes in 1996 gave Russian equal standing. Russian then became the language of administration, business and education. In Minsk the share of first graders taught in Belarusian fell from 58.6% in 1994 to 4.8% in 1998.

A government study of 2009 found that 72% of Belarusians spoke Russian at home and 11.9% actively used Belarusian; others speak Trasianka, a mixture of the two. There are no Belarusian-language universities in the country.

Why there are two ways to spell it

The official norm goes back to a Soviet grammar reform that became law on 16 September 1933, with rules revised in 1959 and again by a reform decided in 2008 and in force from 1 September 2010. An older norm, Taraškievica, known to its users as the classic orthography, survives beside it. It favours pronunciations modelled on Polish, so plan is плян where the official norm writes план, and it spells more phonetically, with a separate letter for the g sound.

Before the Cyrillic alphabet was fixed in 1918, Belarusian was also written in a Latin alphabet, Łacinka, in Arabic script by the Lipka Tatars and in Hebrew letters by Belarusian Jews.

What Belarusian grew from

Its ancestor is Ruthenian, used from the 13th to the 18th century, which descended from Old East Slavic. Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian remain mutually intelligible to a degree. In Poland it is official in five bilingual municipalities.