Russian language in Belarus
Russian is one of the two official languages of Belarus (the other being Belarusian). Being dominant in the media, education and other areas of public life, Russian is de facto the main language of the country.
Distribution per 1897 census
| Guberniya* | Total Population | Belarusian (Бѣлорусскій) | Russian (Великорусскій) | Polish (Польскій) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vilna | 1,591,207 | 891,903 | 78,623 | 130,054 |
| Vitebsk | 1,489,246 | 987,020 | 198,001 | 50,377 |
| Grodno | 1,603,409 | 1,141,714 | 74,143 | 161,662 |
| Minsk | 2,147,621 | 1,633,091 | 83,999 | 64,617 |
| Mogilev | 1,686,764 | 1,389,782 | 58,155 | 17,526 |
| Smolensk | 1,525,279 | 100,757 | 1,397,875 | 7,314 |
| * See also: Administrative-territorial division of Belarus and bordering lands in 2nd half 19 cent. (right half-page) and Ethnical composition of Belarus and bordering lands (prep. by Mikola Bich on the basis of 1897 data) | ||||
After 1995
In 1995, according to the results of the 1995 Belarusian Referendum, the Russian language was declared the second official language. According to the Belarus Census (2009), 41.5% of the Belarusian population declared Russian as their mother language whereas Belarusian is the mother tongue of 53.2% of the population, and 70.2% declared Russian "the language spoken at home" (the second language-related question of the Census). However, minorities do speak Polish, Ukrainian and Eastern Yiddish as well.
References
External links
- Калита И. В. Современная Беларусь: языки и национальная идентичность. Ústí nad Labem, ISBN 978-80-7414-324-3, 2010, 300 s.
- Yu. Koryakov, A Typology of Linguistic Situations and Linguistic Situation in Belarus, a Ph.D. thesis, 2002, Moscow State University (in Russian)
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