The official languages of Belarus are Belarusian and Russian.
The three most widespread linguistic codes in modern Belarus are Belarusian, Russian and the Belarusian-Russian mixed speech commonly called "Trasianka".Hentschel, G. (2014) Belarusian and Russian in the Mixed Speech of Belarus. In: Besters-Dilger, J. et al. (eds.): Congruence in Contact-Induced Language Change: Language Families, Typological Resemblance, and Perceived Similarity. Berlin/Boston, 93-121.
History The earliest known documents from ethnic Belarusian territories date from the 12th century.McMillin, A. (1980): Belorussian. In: Schenker, A. & E. Stankiewicz (ed.): The Slavic literary languages. Formation and development. New Haven, 105-117. Most of them are saints' vitae and sermons written in the Church Slavonic language. In the 13th and 14th century an increasing number of texts, mainly official records and other types of documents, show phonetic, grammatical and lexical characteristics regarded as typically Belarusian.Pryhodzič, M. (1998): Z historyi belaruskaj movy i jaje vyvučėnnja. In: Lukašanec, A. et al. (rėd.): Belaruskaja mova. Opole, 13-24. There is an ongoing scientific discussion about the share of elements from, on one hand, Church Slavonic, on the other hand from autochthonous East Slavonic vernaculars in early East Slavonic texts. In general, however, it can be said that these shares depended on text genres and their evaluation as "high" or "low": In "high" - mainly religious - text genres Church Slavonic prevailed, while in "low" text genres - texts of an everyday nature - the influence of East Slavonic vernaculars dominated.Uspenskij, B. (1987): Istorija russkogo literaturnogo jazyka (XI-XVII vv.), München.
In the late 14th and in the 15th century the Church Slavonic religious writings in East Slavonic territories underwent an archaization known as "rebulgarisation". The purpose of this archaization was to counteract the "falsification" of the divine word which allegedly had been caused by the influence of vernaculars.Birnbaum, H. (1975): "On the significance of the second south Slavic influence for the evolution of the Russian literary language". In: International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 21 (1975), pp. 23-50. Rebulgarisation made Church Slavonic even less comprehensible to the population at large than it already was due to its complex syntax structures and its high share of abstract lexicon. This and the political rise of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with its Slavic majority population contributed to the emergence of a written language on an autochthonous East Slavonic basis. This language emerged as a Koiné language from vernaculars bordering the administrative centers of the Grand Duchy.Cychun, H. (2002): Weißrussisch. In: Okuka, M. (Hrsg.): Lexikon der Sprachen des europäischen Ostens. Klagenfurt, 563-579. It was the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was used in particular by the authorities, in offices and in diplomatic correspondence, but in the course of time it entered former "exclusive" domains of Church Slavonic as well. In contemporary sources it was referred to as "ruskij jazyk", which serves pro-Russian linguistic historiography as an argument to claim it as a part of the history of the Russian language.Brüggemann, M. (2013): Unentbehrliches Russisch, entbehrliches Weißrussisch? Russophone zur Sprachgeschichte und Sprachverwendung in Weißrussland. In: Kempgen, S. et al. (Hrsg.): Deutsche Beiträge zum 15. Internationalen Slavistenkongress Minsk 2013. München etc., 89-98. On the other hand, pro-Belarusian linguistic historiography claims "ruskij jazyk" as "Old Belarusian language" ("starabelaruskaja mova"), which is problematic as well insofar as at that time no distinct Belarusian identity in today's sense of the term had evolved.Plokhy, S. (2006): The origins of the Slavic nations: Premodern identities in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Cambridge. Apart from that the term Ruthenian language is in use, although the latter often refers only to the southern (from today's perspective: Ukrainian) variant of the state language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.
After the Union of Lublin and the Union of Brest the influence of Polish language and culture in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania increased at the cost of Ruthenian, the use of which in official documents of the Grand Duchy was forbidden in 1696. Subsequently, linguistic elements of Belarusian were perpetuated mainly in vernaculars and folklore passed on by word of mouth. After the Partitions of Poland initially Polish remained the social dominant language in Belarus being more and more replaced in this role by Russian, in particular after the November Uprising.
As part of the movement of Romanticism in the 19th century poets and intellectuals with origin from today's Belarus were inspired by the language use of the peasantry and contributed to a new basis for a modern Belarusian literary language, which was only partly connected to the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.Dingley, J. (2001): Sprachen in Weißrußland bis zum Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. In: Beyrau, D. & R. Lindner. (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Geschichte Weißrußlands. Göttingen, 437-450. The language policy of the Russian Empire treated Belarusian as a dialect of Russian. After the January Uprising of 1863, in which Belarusians participated as well, all - for the time being tentative - steps toward a Belarusian linguistic and cultural emancipation were blocked by the authorities.Brüggemann, M. (2014): Die weißrussische und die russische Sprache in ihrem Verhältnis zur weißrussischen Gesellschaft und Nation. Ideologisch-programmatische Standpunkte politischer Akteure und Intellektueller 1994-2010. Oldenburg (Studia Slavica Oldenburgensia 23).
The efforts for the creation of a modern Belarusian literary language intensified after the liberalizations following the 1905 Russian Revolution when inter alia the ban on printed texts in Belarusian was lifted.Gutschmidt, K. (2000): Sprachenpolitik und sprachliche Situation in Weißrußland seit 1989. In: Panzer, B. (Hrsg.): Die sprachliche Situation in der Slavia zehn Jahre nach der Wende. Frankfurt/Main etc., 67-84. A fundamental role for the development of literary norms in modern Belarusian played the newspaper Nasha Niva (published 1906-1915), contributors of which were the leading intellectuals of the Belarusian national movement at that time. As a school subject and language of instruction Belarusian was first introduced under German occupation in the district Ober Ost, which existed from 1915 to 1918.
According with the principles of Lenin's nationality policy in the early years of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR), i.e. in the 1920s, a policy was carried out which aimed at the Belarusization of public life as well as at the terminological development of the Belarusian language. In the early 1930s Soviet state and party leaders began their ideological struggle against alleged "local nationalisms", putting an end to Belarusization and resulting in grave repressions and physical elimination of the pro-Belarusian intelligentsiya in the 1930s and 1940s.Plotnikaŭ, B. (2000): Äußere Ursachen für die begrenzte Verwendung der weißrussischen Sprache. In: Die Welt der Slaven 45 (2000), 49-58. In 1934 Russian was declared language of interethnic communication for the whole territory of the Soviet Union, and in 1938 Russian was introduced as an obligatory subject in all schools in non-Russian Soviet republics. In West Belarus, which in the inter-war period was part of the Polish territory, policy aimed at a long-term assimilation of Belarusians through the medium of Polish education and the influence of the Catholic Church.Bieder, H. (2000): Konfession, Ethnie und Sprache in Weißrußland im 20. Jahrhundert. In: Zeitschrift für Slawistik 45 (2000), 200-214.
Of great importance for the development of the linguistic situation in the decades after World War II were the industrialisation and urbanization of the BSSR, part of which became the Western Belarusian territories formerly belonging to Poland. For the first time Belarusians became the majority population in the urban centers, in which Russian, Jewish and Polish influences had prevailed before World War II.Brüggemann, M. (2014): Zwischen Anlehnung an Russland und Eigenständigkeit: Zur Sprachpolitik in Belarus'. In: Europa ethnica 3-4 (2014), 88-94. At the same time the BSSR became the Soviet republic with the highest share of immigrants from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Specialists from the RSFSR as well as other Russian-speaking "non-Belarusians" often held leadership positions in the post-war BSSR, thus contributing to the role of Russian as the language of social advance. This caused migrants from the Belarusian countryside to the cities to give up their dialectal Belarusian and adjust to the Russian-speaking environment. This way the Belarusian-Russian mixed speech trasianka spread and was perpetuated to the following speaker generation.Hentschel, G. et al. (2014): Trasjanka und Suržyk - gemischte weißrussisch-russische und ukrainisch-russische Rede: Sprachlicher Inzest in Weißrussland und der Ukraine? Frankfurt/Main etc. A law passed by the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR in 1959 allowed pupils taught in schools with Russian as medium of instruction to opt out of Belarusian as a school subject. In 1978 the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union decided to introduce Russian as a school subject already in all first grades of "non-Russian" schools, thus further weakening the position of Belarusian.Zaprudski, S. (2007): In the grip of replacive bilingualism: the Belarusian language in contact with Russian. In: International Journal of the Sociology of Language 183 (2007), 97-118.
At the time of perestroika an improvement of the legal and actual status of the Belarusian language became an important demand of the nationally orientated intelligentsiya, which began to organize itself in the Belarusian Popular Front and, with a narrower focus on language, the Frantsishak Skaryna Belarusian Language Society. Under the pressure of this "national rebirth" movement in 1990 the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR passed a language law which declared Belarusian the sole official language of the BSSR.
Development since the dissolution of the Soviet Union