BY-1309480 The Belarusian Alphabet

 

 

Belarusian is an official language of Belarus, along with Russian, and is spoken abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Belarusian is one of the East Slavic languages and shares many grammatical and lexical features with other members of the group. To some extent, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian are mutually intelligible.

At the 1999 Belarus Census, the Belarusian language was declared as a "language spoken at home" by about 3,686,000 Belarusian citizens (36.7% of the population). About 6,984,000 (85.6%) of Belarusians declared it their "mother tongue". According to a study done by the Belarusian government in 2009, 72% of Belarusians speak Russian at home, while Belarusian is used by only 11.9% of Belarusians. 29.4% of Belarusians can write, speak, and read Belarusian, while 52.5% can only read and speak it. According to the research, one out of ten Belarusians does not understand Belarusian.

The Belarusian alphabet is a variant of the Cyrillic script which was first used as an alphabet for the Old Church Slavonic language. The modern Belarusian form was identified in 1918 and consists of thirty-two letters.

This postcard from Olga ( 27 June 2014) Postcrossing shows 34 letters of the alphabet . This is because the combination <д> with letters <ж> and <з> denote two distinct respective sounds and some representations of the Belarusian alphabet will include them <дж> <дз> .