Is Belarusian worth learning? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Is Belarusian worth learning?
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22 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

vonPeterhof
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Message 17 of 22

10 May 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged

Bakunin wrote:

What intrigues me about this map is that there doesn't seem to be a clear geographical pattern. Russian is dominant along the Russian border, but there's also a strong Russian-speaking pocket in the far South-West of the country where Poland, Ukraine and Belarus meet. Is what we see here maybe a purely urban-rural divide in the sense that this map would align nicely with a map of urban vs. rural areas in Belarus? Or is something else going on? And if, as it seems, Belorussian is spoken in all regions of the country, what about the border regions of neighboring countries - are there Belorussian speaking minorities in Russia, Ukraine and maybe even Lithuania or Latvia? I know that there is a Belorussian minority along the Polish-Belarus border around Białystok.

The urban-rural divide can certainly be seen on the map. The little circles inside some of the districts appear to be the larger cities administered separately from the surrounding districts and/or directly by the provincial government. All of those circles are the darkest blue. The situation with the south-western corner around the city of Brest is a bit more curious though. I recall that this part of the country was always under heavy Polish influence: my mother visited Brest at some point in the late 70s-early 80s, and even then there were more Polish channels on TV than Soviet ones, even though most of the actual ethnic Poles had left/been expelled from there in the years following WWII, as Cabaire has said. However, I don't think the replacement of the local population by transplants from Russia and elsewhere outside Belarus is the only explanation: the share of ethnic Russians doesn't exceed 10% in any of the three south-western dark blue districts, and in the city of Brest itself it's barely above 10% (all four territories have more than 80% of the population self-identifying as Belarusian, according to Wikipedia). I think the answer to Bakunin's question about the border regions might provide an additional clue.

Here is a map of dialects within Belarus, combined with a couple estimates of the boundaries of the Belarusian language area:

The red boundary is based on the 1903 research of Belarusian language area by the linguist Yefim Karskiy, while the other two lines are based on the Soviet-era research of Russian and Ukrainian dialects. As you can see, while the Belarusian area extends deep into western Russia, covering even the major city of Smolensk, part of the boundary with Ukrainian is actually well within the territory of modern Belarus, to the point that some linguists count the Polesia dialects (yellow on the map) as dialects of Ukrainian rather than Belarusian (others see them as mixed/transitional between the two languages). The inhabitants of the Polesia area were long known for not caring much about ethnic and/or linguistic identities - well into the 20th century they identified themselves simply as local and wouldn't give a clear answer to the question of what their native language was. Considering that the area only became part of Soviet Belarus long after it had abandoned the policy of fostering a Belarusian identity and promoting the standard Belarusian language in all spheres of life, it's not surprising that linguistic Russification took hold there, even if the populace did start referring to themselves as Belarusian.
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Serpent
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Message 18 of 22

10 May 2014 at 11:33am | IP Logged

Medulin wrote:

they speak it only at home, so by using their home language, you're disrupting their privacy, with foreigners their prefer using the more ''formal'' language, and between Russian and Belarusian, that would be Russian.

Learning Corsican in order to use it on Corsica, Welsh to use it in Wales, Galician to use it in Galicia, may not always be practical, since most people in cities cannot speak them, they are used mostly in rural parts of these territories.

Even this map is probably too optimistic, since it's based on what you say at the census. Those who speak Trasjanka (the mixture) may well call themselves native speakers of Belarusian. There might be elements of Polish too, potentially forming a dialect continuum (except that there's too much isolation).
I'd say the situation is worse than in the places you mentioned. And as for speaking it at home, nah nope.
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Марк
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Message 19 of 22

12 May 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged

Tryasanka can be called the Belarussian language. As far as I know, in big cities Standard Russian is spoken, in towns Russian with some dialect phonetical features is spoken, in the countryside some kind of Belarussian is spoken. In both Ukraine and Belarus people often name their mothertongue according to their ethnicity. Russian is actually spoken more widely there.
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Serpent
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Message 20 of 22

12 May 2014 at 10:32pm | IP Logged

No, Trasjanka is basically Russian with some individual Belarusian words and some phonetic peculiarities, including the voiced h (like also in Ukrainian and Czech), a hard ch and a stronger аканье than in Russian. There are no rules and almost everyone speaks Trasjanka slightly differently. Lukashenko himself can only speak Trasjanka and not real Belarusian.

As a linguist I notice some peculiarities even in large cities, often things that are considered a bit uneducated in Moscow or St Petersburg (though not necessarily elsewhere in Russia). In the Western regions it can even be a mixture of three languages - Russian, Belarusian and Polish.
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Марк
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Message 21 of 22

13 May 2014 at 1:17am | IP Logged

That's a political question. We can easily call Trasjanka belorussian with some Russian influence, why not?
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Serpent
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Message 22 of 22

13 May 2014 at 1:31am | IP Logged

The main point is that if the OP (or I, for that matter) learn/s Belarusian with textbooks or media, we'll hardly find anyone who speaks that way, apart from language enthusiasts and maybe people in some rural areas.

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