The Belarusian language belongs to the Slavic group of languages together with Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Serbian, Croatian, Russian and others. Belarusian is closely akin to Ukrainian, to a less extent to Russian.

During the communist times the policy of the so-called ‘russisation’ was pursued and nowadays this process has its continuation. It happens because the country is ruled by the former soviet communists who hate everything as far as the Belarusian identity is concerned. In addition to the fact that they are former communists the majority of our government are not Belarusians at all. The result of this is high percentage of unnecessary words and constructions from Russian which in the speech of the people who do not use the language in everyday life substitute the authentic Belarusian words. The best example of it is the speech of TV and radio broadcasters. Popular is the mixed language which is called ‘trasianka’ (e.g. ‘stirred language), it is the mixture of Russian and Belarusian but many people who speak it are sure they speak pure Russian. In the beginning of the nineties there was even suggestion to recognize ‘trasianka’ as a state language.

Modern literary Belarusian is founded on the dialects of central Belarus, which are characterized by by strong ‘akanie’, also by ‘dzekanie’, ‘cekanie’ (the pronunciation of palatalized d and t as soft affricates – phonetic dzj, tsj).

The official beginning of the Belarusian language times back to the Great Dutchy of Lithuania (do not mix with the modern Lithuanians, at that time the name Litva meant the territory occupied by Harodnia region and southern Lithuania (in modern times) with rather mixed population. Anyway the Zhamoits and Aukshtaits (the ancestors of the modern Lithuanians) were less numerous and less civilized than their Slav subjects and hence it was that they together with our ancestors took over the Old Belarusian as an official language of administration and also of literature.

One of the first examples of Belarusian literature is Francišak Skaryna’s translation of Bible, printed in Prague in 1517-1519. It was the third printed Bible after the German and Czech ones in Europe. Important too are the Lithuanian Chronicles and the Lithuanian Statute (the first in the world prototype of modern Constitutions), numerous church writings all dating from the 16^th century. After the establishment of the Uniat (Greek Catholic) Church and making union with Poland, Belarusian language began to be strongly polonized. This can be seen in the numerous ‘intermedia’ and ‘school dramas’ of that days which have been preserved to this day in manuscripts written in the Latin alphabet.

The modern Belarusian literature backs to the 19^th century, when the travesty of the Aeneid by Vikienci Ravinski and anonymous comic epos Taras on Parnassus were written. Among other important for the language development figures we should name Dunin Marcinkievič, J. Čačot, J.Lučyna, F.Baguševič.

From 1906 the periodical ‘Naša niva’ (our cornfield) began publishing in Vilnia (Vilnius) with the participation of the best writers and poets of that time. Among them where the fathers of the modern Belarusian literary language Janka Kupala (Ivan Lucevič) and Jakub Kolas (K. Mickievič).

In the Decree of 28^th August 1933, the modern variant of the Belarusian Cyrillic writing was adopted. There were some debated points mainly in phonetics. As a result the ‘reform’ brought Belarusian spelling close to Russian and affected some fundamental grammatical features of the Belarusian language. So grammatically and phonetically Belarusian became much closer to Russian and it was made in artificial way just to suit our language to the communist theory of ‘merging languages’, merging, of course, into Russian.

In 1991, after getting independence, Belarusian was recognized as the state language of the Republic of Belarus. But the newly elected president having no or poor knowledge of the language anounced a referendum including a question on the status of the Belarusian language: ‘Do you agree with giving to the Russian language the equal status with the Belarusian language?’, and violating by this question the laws of the Republic.

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