Editing Belarusian language (section)

== Grammar ==
{{main |Belarusian grammar}}{{Unreferenced section|date=July 2024}}
Standardized [[Belarusian grammar]] in its modern form was adopted in 1959, with minor amendments in 1985 and 2008. It was developed from the initial form set down by [[Branislaw Tarashkyevich]] (first printed in [[Vilnius]], 1918), and it is mainly based on the Belarusian folk dialects of [[Minsk]]-[[Vilnius]] region. Historically, there have been several other alternative standardized forms of Belarusian grammar.

Belarusian grammar is mostly synthetic and partly analytic, and overall quite similar to [[Russian grammar]]. Belarusian orthography, however, differs significantly from [[Russian orthography]] in some respects, due to the fact that it is a [[phonemic orthography]] that closely represents the surface phonology, whereas Russian orthography represents the underlying [[morphophonology]].

The most significant instance of this is found in the representation of vowel reduction, and in particular ''[[Akanye|akanje]]'', the merger of unstressed /a/ and /o/, which exists in both Russian and Belarusian. Belarusian always spells this merged sound as {{angbr|a}}, whereas Russian uses either {{angbr|a}} or {{angbr|o}}, according to what the "underlying" phoneme is (determined by identifying the related words where the vowel is being stressed or, if no such words exist, by written tradition, mostly but not always conforming to etymology). This means that Belarusian noun and verb paradigms, in their written form, have numerous instances of alternations between written {{angbr|a}} and {{angbr|o}}, whereas no such alternations exist in the corresponding written paradigms in Russian. This can significantly complicate the foreign speakers' task of learning these paradigms; on the other hand, though, it makes spelling easier for native speakers.

An example illustrating the contrast between the treatment of ''akanje'' in Russian and Belarusian orthography is the spelling of the word for "products; food":
* In [[Ukrainian language|Ukrainian]]: продукти (pronounced "produkty", [[Help:IPA/Ukrainian|IPA]]: [pro'duktɪ])
* In [[Russian language|Russian]]: продукты (pronounced "pradukty", [[Help:IPA/Russian|IPA]]: [prɐˈduktɨ])
* In Belarusian: прадукты (pronounced "pradukty", [[Help:IPA/Belarusian|IPA]]: [pra'duktɨ])

[[File:Languages and dialects of central and eastern Europe.png|thumb|Map of languages and dialects of Central and Eastern Europe]]