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.