Belarusian stress is free and mobile, and because the spelling follows the sound, getting the stress wrong changes the spelling too.
I can place the stress correctly in common words and use the spelling to work out where it falls.
Look at these examples. Can you spot the grammar pattern?
На стале ляжаць адзінаццаць кніг.
There are eleven books on the table.
Вакно вялікае, а вокны ў суседа малыя.
The window is big, but the neighbour's windows are small.
Яна ўзяла кошык і пайшла ў лес.
She took the basket and went into the forest.
Каля плота расце крапіва.
Nettles grow by the fence.
Pay attention to the highlighted parts. What do they have in common?
In Russian, misplacing the stress sounds wrong. In Belarusian it also spells wrong, because akanne and jakanne are written. If you think the stress in вада is on the first syllable, you will write вода. Stress is therefore not a finishing touch but part of learning the word.
Free: it can fall on any syllable, and there is no rule that predicts it from the shape of the word. Mobile: it can move within the paradigm of a single word.
| Pattern | Example |
|---|---|
| Fixed on the stem | кні́га - кні́гі - кні́зе |
| Fixed on the ending | стала́ - сталу́ |
| Moving to the ending in the plural | во́зера - азё́ры |
| Moving to the stem in the plural | вакно́ - во́кны |
Many cognate words carry the stress on different syllables, and these are worth learning as a list rather than deriving:
The past tense often shifts to the ending in the feminine: быў - была́ - бы́ло - бы́лі, узя́ў - узяла́, даў - дала́. This is the single most productive pattern to learn, because it affects the commonest verbs.
The acute accent is used only in dictionaries, textbooks and where a word would otherwise be ambiguous. In ordinary writing it is not marked, so the spelling is your evidence: any о or э you see is stressed, without exception in native words. That is a genuinely useful reading rule.
Apply this grammar in C1 course exercises
Practice ExercisesTypical errors: carrying the Russian stress across to a cognate, and writing о in an unstressed syllable as a result.
Carrying the Russian stress to a cognate
Learn адзінаццаць, крапіва and стары as a list.
Writing о in an unstressed syllable
The stress decides the letter.
Not shifting the stress in the feminine past
Была, узяла, дала.
Keeping the stress fixed through a mobile paradigm
Возера gives азёры; вакно gives вокны.
На стале ляжаць адзінаццаць кніг.
There are eleven books on the table.
<em>Адзінаццаць</em> is stressed on the third syllable, unlike its Russian cognate.
Вакно вялікае, а вокны ў суседа малыя.
The window is big, but the neighbour's windows are small.
The stress moves to the stem in the plural, and the spelling moves with it.
Яна ўзяла кошык і пайшла ў лес.
She took the basket and went into the forest.
<em>Узяла</em> stresses the ending in the feminine past.
Каля плота расце крапіва.
Nettles grow by the fence.
<em>Крапіва</em> stresses the last syllable.
Возера замерзла, а азёры на поўначы яшчэ не.
The lake has frozen, but the northern lakes have not yet.
The stress moves to the ending in the plural, so о becomes ё.
Practice in course
Apply this grammar in C1 course exercises
The academic reference grammar behind the phonology, orthoepy and morphology sections: the 32-letter inventory, дж and дз as digraphs rather than letters, and the normative description of akanne and jakanne. A print work; no URL is given, because the only one available is a library catalogue record that carries none of the text.
The current academic reference grammar; the linked edition serves the full text. Its morphology part is the source for the paradigms used here. On the neuter noun it states the nominative singular endings as -а (-о) and -е (-ё), and gives the nominative plural as -ы after a hard consonant (сёлы, вёдры) against -і after a soft consonant and after к, х (палі, воблакі).
The state orthographic norm in force since 1 September 2010, cited as the law itself. It is what makes the written forms of akanne and jakanne, the obligatory ё, ў after a vowel and the apostrophe in place of a hard sign normative rather than conventional. No URL is given deliberately: the rules text is not published at a stable public address - the pages that carry the law show only its enacting articles - so a link here would imply a verification a reader cannot perform.