Belarusian

Belarusian is a Slavic language, which along with Russian, is official in Belarus. Though Belarusian is an official language of Belarus, the majority of Belarusians speak Russian as their first language.  Belarusian is closely related to other East Slavic languages, especially Ukrainian.

Though Belarusian and Russian are similar, the two languages differ significantly in orthography. Belarusian has a phonetic orthography that closely represents the surface phonology, and Russian orthography represents the underlying phonology. This can be seen in akanye, the merger of unstressed /a/ and /o/, which exists in both Belarusian and Russian. Belarusian always spells the merged sound as /a/, but Russian uses either /a/ or /o/, depending on the underlying phoneme.

Belarusian, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish share a high degree of mutual intelligibility. The Belarusian language has 80% mutual intelligibility with Ukrainian, 75% with Russian and 41% with Polish.  Belarusian is thus most closely related to Ukrainian.

The Belarusian language has two main dialects, the northeastern and the southwestern. The northeastern dialect is characterized by a soft /r/ and strong akanye, and the southwestern dialect by a hard /r/ and moderate akanye.

Belarusian and Russian are both official languages of Belarus. Though Belarusian and Russian are similar to one another. Belarusian is closest to Ukrainian. Belarusian and Ukrainian both share akanye, the merger of unstressed /a/ and /o/, a feature which does not occur in Ukrainian.