ABSTRACT
Belorussian is a member of the East Slavonic group of the Slavonic branch of Indo-European. Often regarded in the past as a dialect of Russian, it has now achieved official status as the language of the Belorussian Republic (capital Minsk). It derives from a complex of West Russian dialects which were spoken in the large area between the Pripet and the western Dvina, and which, from the thirteenth century onwards, coalesced towards a common norm. This process was hastened by the fact that an ecclesiastical form of West Russian was the offi cial language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (thirteenth to sixteenth centu ries). By the same token, Polish influence on Belorussian is due to Polish ascendancy within the Grand Duchy (Lithuanian itself was not used as a written language till the sixteenth/seventeenth centuries). Under the Russian tsars, Belorussian was proscribed. Since 1917, the language has been codified and standardized, and is now the vehicle for a considerable literature.