Belarusian alphabet: 32 letters and pronunciation

The Belarusian alphabet has 32 letters. It is written in Cyrillic, so if you already read Russian or Ukrainian you are most of the way there. The inventory, though, is not the same: Belarusian has no и, no щ and no hard sign ъ, and it carries two letters that set it apart, і and ў.

Ten of the 32 are vowel letters (а, е, ё, і, о, у, ы, э, ю, я), twenty-one are consonants, and one - the soft sign ь - spells no sound at all: it marks the softness of the consonant in front of it. Three further signs belong to the writing system without being counted as letters: the apostrophe ' and the digraphs дж and дз, each of which spells a single sound.

The full alphabet

Ў, the letter with its own monument

Ў ў is called у нескладовае, "non-syllabic u", and it stands twenty-second in the alphabet. The sound is the w of English how: воўк (wolf), аўтобус (bus), ён быў там (he was there). It does not begin a word and does not follow a consonant - it appears after a vowel, which is why у turns into ў the moment a vowel lands in front of it: у Мінску, but жыве ў Мінску. No other Slavic language uses it, and in September 2003, during the Day of Belarusian Writing, Polatsk put up a monument to the letter on Skaryna Avenue.

Five sound rules that do most of the work

1. Аканне. Unstressed о and э become а, and the spelling follows the sound: галава (head), малако (milk), дарога (road). Belarusian writes what it hears. This holds absolutely for о; unstressed э survives in loanwords - тэлефон, тэмпература, аэрапорт, рэцэпт.

2. Яканне. In the syllable immediately before the stress, е and ё become я: лес → лясы (forests), сястра (sister), зямля (earth).

3. Дзеканне and цеканне. Where a soft д or т would stand, Belarusian has the affricates дз and ц: дзень (day), дзеці (children), цётка (aunt), ціха (quietly). Phoneticians treat this pair of processes as the most audible signature of the language.

4. Permanently hard consonants. ч, р, ж, ш have no soft counterparts, so the vowel written after them is ы, never і. Hard ц behaves the same way (цыбуля, аперацыя), but the soft ц' that tsekanne produces takes і, е, ё, я: ціха, цётка, цела: чытаць (to read), рыба (fish), жыццё (life), шыпшына (rosehip), цыбуля (onion).

5. Г is a fricative. Belarusian г is [ɣ] - a breathy sound, close to the g of casually spoken German sagen, and not the hard [g] of English go. The plosive [g] is marginal: it survives in a few borrowings and has no letter of its own in the school standard.

Two spelling traditions, one alphabet

You will meet two written norms. The school and state standard, informally наркамаўка, is fixed by the orthography law of 2008, in force since September 2010. The classical tradition, тарашкевіца, goes back to Branislaŭ Taraškievič's grammar of 1918 and was re-codified in 2005; it writes assimilative softness (сьнег, зьвер) and optionally uses an extra letter ґ for the plosive [g] in loanwords. The 32 letters are the same in both traditions - what differs is spelling habits, not the alphabet.

Where these letters live

Francysk Skaryna, born in Polatsk, printed his first book in Prague in 1517, which is why the Day of Belarusian Writing is a public holiday rather than a specialist's date. Practise the alphabet on words that carry the culture - дранікі, зубр, папараць-кветка (the fern flower of the Kupalle night), талака - and the chart stops being a chart.