Belarusian Phonology

The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is no absolute agreement on the number of phonemes; rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars.

Many consonants may form pairs that differ only in palatalization (called ''hard'' and ''soft'' consonants, the latter being represented in the IPA with the symbol ). In some of such pairs, the place of articulation is additionally changed (see distinctive features below). Some consonants do not have palatalized counterparts.

Distinctive features

As an East Slavic language, Belarusian phonology is very similar to both Russian and Ukrainian phonology. The primary differences are:
* Akannye () – the merger of unstressed into . The pronunciation of the merged vowel is a clear open front unrounded vowel , including after soft consonants and . In standard Russian akanye, the merger happens only after hard consonants; after soft consonants, merges with instead. Ukrainian does not have this merger at all. In Belarusian, unlike Russian, this change is reflected in spelling: compare "head", pronounced , with Russian and Ukrainian .
* Lack of ikanye (the Russian sound change in which unstressed has merged with , and unstressed and with after soft consonants). Instead, unstressed merges with ( yakannye). Compare Belarusian with Russian and Ukrainian .
Not all instances of are subject to yakannye in literary Belarusian, for example instead of па́ляц , which occurs only dialectally. In standard Belarusian, yakannye after palatalized consonants occurs in the syllable immediately preceding the tonic syllable: "song" — "singer" — "singers". Exceptions are allowed in loanwords: "medal".
* Tsyekannye () and dzyekannye () – the pronunciation of Old East Slavic as soft affricates . This occurs in "ten", pronounced ; compare Russian , Ukrainian .
Many Russian speakers similarly affricate phonemic , but this is not universal and not written.
* Relatively stronger palatalization of and .
* Postalveolar consonants are all ''hard'' (laminal retroflex), whereas Russian has both hard and soft postalveolars.
* has hardened and merged with .
* Unlike in standard Russian, historical before consonants has merged with and is pronounced . This is reflected in the spelling, which uses a special symbol known as "non-syllabic ''u''" (), written as an with a breve diacritic on top of it: , ^? . ^? For example: Belarusian — Russian волк . The merger did not occur before suffixes (before historical ⟨ъ⟩ in the word middle): Russian and "stick".
* Lenition of to similarly to Ukrainian, Czech, or Slovak, and unlike Russian and Polish.
* Proto-Slavic shifted to Belarusian and Russian before a hard consonant. Compare the Belarusian word for "green", , and the Russian word, , with Ukrainian .

Unlike in Russian but like in Ukrainian, Belarusian spelling closely represents surface phonology rather than the underlying morphophonology. For example, akannye, tsyekannye, dzyekannye and the allophone of and are all written. The representation of akannye in particular introduces striking differences between Russian and Belarusian orthography.

Vowels

As with Russian, is not a separate phoneme, but an allophone of occurring after non-palatalized consonants.

Consonants

The consonants of Belarusian are as follows:

The rare phonemes and are present only in several borrowed words: , . Other borrowed words have the fricative pronunciation: ('geography'). In addition, and are allophones of and respectively, when voiced by regressive assimilation, as in 'train station'.

In the syllable coda, is pronounced or , forming diphthongs, and is spelled . sometimes derives etymologically from , as with ('wolf'), which comes from Proto-Slavic . Similar to Ukrainian, there are also alternations between and in the past tense of verbs: for example, "(he) thought" versus "(she) thought". This evolved historically from a form with (as in Russian: ) which vocalized like the in Polish (cognate , "he mused").

The geminated variations are transcribed as follows:
*
*
*
*
*
*
* .

References

Bibliography

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Further reading

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Belarusian Phonology
Phonology
Slavic phonologies