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Russian is one of the two official languages of Belarus (the other being Belarusian). Being dominant in the media, education and other areas of public life, Russian is de facto the main language of the country.
| Guberniya * | Total Population | Belarusian (Бѣлорусскій) | Russian (Великорусскій) | Polish (Польскій) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vilna | 1,591,207 | 891,903 | 78,623 | 130,054 |
| Vitebsk | 1,489,246 | 987,020 | 198,001 | 50,377 |
| Grodno | 1,603,409 | 1,141,714 | 74,143 | 161,662 |
| Minsk | 2,147,621 | 1,633,091 | 83,999 | 64,617 |
| Mogilev | 1,686,764 | 1,389,782 | 58,155 | 17,526 |
| Smolensk | 1,525,279 | 100,757 | 1,397,875 | 7,314 |
| * See also: Administrative-territorial division of Belarus and bordering lands in 2nd half 19 cent. (right half-page) and Ethnical composition of Belarus and bordering lands (prep. by Mikola Bich on the basis of 1897 data) | ||||
In 1995, according to the results of the 1995 Belarusian Referendum, the Russian language was declared the second official language. According to the Belarus Census (2009), 41.5% of the Belarusian population declared Russian as their mother language whereas Belarusian is the mother tongue of 53.2% of the population, and 70.2% declared Russian "the language spoken at home" (the second language-related question of the Census). However, minorities do speak Polish, Ukrainian and Eastern Yiddish as well.
Belarusians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Belarus. More than 9.5 million people proclaim Belarusian ethnicity worldwide. Nearly 8 million Belarusians reside in Belarus, with the United States and Russia being home to more than half a million Belarusians each.
Belarusian is an East Slavic language. It is one of the two official languages in Belarus, alongside Russian. Additionally, it is spoken in some parts of Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine by Belarusian minorities in those countries.
Minsk is the capital and the largest city of Belarus, located on the Svislach and the now subterranean Niamiha rivers. As the capital, Minsk has a special administrative status in Belarus and is the administrative centre of Minsk Region and Minsk District. As of 2023, it has a population of two million, making Minsk the 11th-most populous city in Europe. Minsk is one of the administrative capitals of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU).
The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, also known simply as Byelorussia, was a republic of the Soviet Union (USSR). It existed between 1920 and 1991 as one of fifteen constituent republics of the USSR, with its own legislation from 1990 to 1991. The republic was ruled by the Communist Party of Byelorussia and was also referred to as Soviet Byelorussia or Soviet Belarus by a number of historians. Other names for Byelorussia included White Russia or White Russian Soviet Socialist Republic and Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.
Ruthenian and Ruthene are exonyms of Latin origin, formerly used in Eastern and Central Europe as common ethnonyms for East Slavs, particularly during the late medieval and early modern periods. The Latin term Rutheni was used in medieval sources to describe all Eastern Slavs of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, as an exonym for people of the former Kievan Rus', thus including ancestors of the modern Belarusians, Rusyns and Ukrainians. The use of Ruthenian and related exonyms continued through the early modern period, developing several distinctive meanings, both in terms of their regional scopes and additional religious connotations.
Ruthenian is an exonymic linguonym for a closely related group of East Slavic linguistic varieties, particularly those spoken from the 15th to 18th centuries in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and in East Slavic regions of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Regional distribution of those varieties, both in their literary and vernacular forms, corresponded approximately to the territories of the modern states of Belarus and Ukraine. By the end of the 18th century, they gradually diverged into regional variants, which subsequently developed into the modern Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn languages.
The national emblem of Belarus features a ribbon in the colors of the national flag, a silhouette of Belarus, wheat ears and a red star. It is sometimes referred to as the coat of arms of Belarus, although in heraldic terms this is inaccurate as the emblem does not respect the rules of conventional heraldry. The emblem is an allusion to one that was used by the Byelorussian SSR, designed by Ivan Dubasov in 1950, with the biggest change being a replacement of the Communist hammer and sickle with a silhouette of Belarus. The Belarusian name is Dziaržaŭny hierb Respubliki Biełaruś, and the name in Russian is Gosudarstvennyĭ gerb Respubliki Belarusʹ.
Trasianka refers to a mixed form of speech in which Belarusian and Russian elements and structures are combined arbitrarily. There is a similar phenomenon in Ukraine, a Ukrainian–Russian language mixture, called Surzhyk.
Belarus elects on national level a head of state—the president—and a legislature. The president is elected for a five-year term by the people. The National Assembly has two chambers. The House of Representatives has 110 members elected in single-seat constituencies elected for a four-year term. The Council of the Republic has 64 members, 56 members indirectly elected and eight members appointed by the president.
Nasha Niva is one of the oldest Belarusian weekly newspapers, founded in 1906 and re-established in 1991. Nasha Niva became a cultural symbol, due to the newspaper's importance as a publisher of Belarusian literature and as a pioneer of Belarusian language journalism, the years before the October Revolution are often referred to as the 'Nasha Niva Period'.
Belarusian Americans or White Russian Americans are Americans who are of total or partial Belarusian ancestry.
The Polish minority in Belarus numbers officially 288,000 according to 2019 census. However, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland the number is as high as 1,100,000. It forms the second largest ethnic minority in the country after the Russians, at around 3.1% of the total population. An estimated 205,200 Belarusian Poles live in large agglomerations and 82,493 in smaller settlements, with the number of women exceeding the number of men by 33,905. Some estimates by Polish non-governmental sources in the U.S. are higher, citing the previous poll held in 1989 under the Soviet authorities with 413,000 Poles recorded.
Christianity is the main religion in Belarus, with Eastern Orthodoxy being the largest denomination. The legacy of the state atheism of the Soviet era is evident in the fact that a part of the Belarusians are not religious. Moreover, other non-traditional and new religions have sprung up in the country after the end of the Soviet Union.
Belarus and Lithuania established diplomatic relations on 24 October 1991, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The two countries share 680 kilometres (420 mi) of common border. Lithuania's border with Belarus is the country's longest border. For Belarus it is its 3rd-longest border.
Minsk State Linguistic University is a public university in Minsk, Belarus. It specializes in language education and offers courses in 18 foreign languages including English, German, French, and Spanish. The university also trains teachers of Russian and Belarusian as foreign languages. It was founded in 1948 as Minsk State Pedagogical Institute for Foreign Languages and today is considered the flagship university in Belarus for language education and translator training.
Taraškievica or Belarusian Classical Orthography is a variant of orthography of the Belarusian language, based on the literary norm of the modern Belarusian language, the first normalization of which was made by Branislaŭ Taraškievič in 1918, and was in official use in Belarus until the Belarusian orthography reform of 1933. Since 1933, Taraškievica has been used informally in Belarus and by the Belarusian diaspora abroad. In a more common sense Taraškievica is sometimes considered to be a linguistic norm.
The official languages of Belarus are Belarusian and Russian.
Mova Nanova is a Belarusian course that has taken place in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, since January 13, 2014. It is a non-profit NGO, a cultural and linguistic initiative aimed at expanding the everyday use of the Belarusian language, which alongside Russian is one of the two official languages of Belarus. The lessons are held in the gallery of modern art «Ў». The initiative has caught on and has been acclaimed by other regional cities that support the endeavour locally – now the courses can be also found in Baranavičy, Hrodna, Babrujsk, Niasviž, Brest, Maladziečna, Mahilioŭ, Viciebsk and Homel. The undertaking has also expanded outside Belarus and has an affiliate group in Kraków. On 23 July 2021, Mova Nanova was forcibly disbanded by the Minsk district executive committee.
Belarusian Germans formed a notable ethnic minority on the lands of modern Belarus before World War I.
The Russification of Belarus is a policy of replacing the use of the Belarusian language and the presence of Belarusian culture and mentality in various spheres of public life in Belarus by the corresponding Russian analogs. Russification is one of the major reasons of low rate of adoption of the Belarusian language by Belarusians.