Belarusian language

Belarusian language is a Indo-European language is an East Slavic language that is a member of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the Slavic languages, which are a component of the wider Balto-Slavic branch. In accordance with Article 17 of the present Constitution, it is the native language of Belarusians and is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Belarus, together with Russian, in addition to English. It is also spoken by Belarusian minority in several regions of Russia and the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, and Ukraine, among other places.

Prior to Belarus's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the language was only known in English as Byelorussian or Belorussian, the compound term retaining the English-language name for the Russian language in its second part, or alternatively as White Ruthenian or White Russian, depending on who you asked. Following independence, it was given the extra appellation of Belarusian, which means "Belarusian in English."

Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, the first effort was made to standardise and codify the language. This was followed by a number of further attempts. Belarusian, being one of the East Slavic languages, has a lot in common with the other members of the group in terms of grammatical and lexical traits. A degree of mutual intelligibility exists between Russian, Rusyn, Ukrainian, and Belarusian, at least to a certain level. This period's previous stage is recognised in Western academics as the Ruthenian period (14th to 17th century), which in turn derived from what is known in contemporary linguistics as the Old East Slavic period (10th to 13th centuries).

The Belarusian language was recognised as a "language spoken at home" by around 3,686,000 Belarusian residents in the first Belarus Census, which took place in 1999. (36.7 percent of the population). Approximately 6,984,000 Belarusians (85.6 percent) identified it as their "mother tongue." Other sources, such as Ethnologue, estimate the number of active speakers to be roughly 2.5 million people.

An official government research conducted in 2009 found that 72 percent of Belarusians use Russian at home, with just 11.9 percent of Belarusians actively using Belarusian as their first language. Approximately 29.4 percent of Belarusians can write, speak, and read Belarusian, while 52.5 percent can just read and speak it, according to the most recent statistics.

Belarusian is listed as a vulnerable language in the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, which is published every five years.