Are Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian dialects of one language continuum or separate languages?
“Dialects of one continuum” and “separate languages” isn’t an either/or.Think of a dialect continuum like a colour gradient, lets say between red and green. The different shades of Red all understand each other, the different shades of Green all understand each other. The Reds and Greens struggle to understand each other. The shades of Yellow in the middle understand most of what both the Red and the Green speakers say.Then someone comes along and codifies one Green dialect and teaches people to write in it. Imagine dropping a green pin in the area where the dialect is natively spoken. What this pin does is it makes the whole continuum more green, because from that moment on all literate people are writing in Standard Green, which starts to influence their spoken dialects more.Eventually Red nationalists are upset about having to use this unnatural written standard and the fact that it’s influencing their language so much, so someone creates a Standard Red language. A red pin is dropped on the far left of the continuum, and now we have two forces colouring the continuum. What this results in after a few generations is the dialect continuum becoming less fluid in space – there’s a fairly solid red block at one end and a larger fairly solid green block at the other, and a thin yellow band in the middle, whose speakers would likely fail their nationalist movement if they tried to drop a third pin.Those fairly solid red and green blocks are what laymen call “separate languages” and “languages in their own right” and all those other political platitudes, but they can still be part of a dialect continuum.And that’s pretty much the nature of East Slavic languages. There is still a dialect continuum there (see Southern Russian dialects), there are even still traces of the dialect continuum which connected West Slavic languages to East Slavic (West Polesian microlanguage, Rusyn language, Eastern Slovak dialects) but thanks to the fact that nearly everyone is literate and there are now multiple literary languages, as well as a whole load of other sociolinguistic reasons regarding Russian, different parts of the continuum have homogenised a lot more and there are not as many speakers of transitional dialects as there used to be.
Should Belarus be split according to Belarusian language dialects: southern dialect re-united with Ukrainian into Ruthenian language and northern dialect to be expanded again on Novgorodian Republic separated from Moscow?
In that Ukrainian irredentists have only intermittently laid claims to the Brest Region in the southwest of Belarus, the Novgorod Republic more than five centuries dead certainly does not inspire any significant number of separatists in northwestern Russia, Belarusians do not identify themselves as Ukrainians, and it is difficult to see anyone in and around Belarus favouring the partition of a perfectly functional buffer state, this partition plan is doomed to be ignored.(Incidentally, someone has raised the prospect of a restored Novgorod Republic on Quora occasionally over the years, here and here. Would that the questioner actually provided some evidence to suggest that such a novel idea had not so much a chance of succeeding as any recognition on the ground.)
Is Belarusian perceived as an “old-fashioned” dialect among younger generations in Belarus?
I was born in Gomel, BSSR, and lived there for 9 years till it became Belarus again and my family left for the states during this breakaway, so I will tell you what I know from my perspective.During the Soviet program of Russification, while Belarus was not independent and called the BSSR (Belarussian Soviet Socialist Republic); any schools in any city that was a true population center had to teach mainstream Russian or otherwise the teachers were expelled.So, culturally, I would be fine if I traveled to St. Petersburg or Moscow or talked art or entertainment or politics in any major Russian city... at the same time, if my family or I were to venture into any of the old towns on the perimeter of our cities in Belarus, we could expect a bit of a language barrier.So to answer your question.. Russian in Belarus is the language of city dwellers and educated, regardless of age. While Belarussian is regarded as something of a social/geographic/socioeconomic demarcation.At least this is how it was always presented/explained to me during my young life in Belarus and from my family while in the states.Perhaps someone living in the current climate for the past 22 years could tell you different, but the above is definitely the way it was during USSR's time, when Belarus was BSSR.
Why has the Belarusian language almost died out, unlike Ukrainian or other languages of Soviet republics?
There are 3 main reasons:History. All territory of Belarus was in Russian Empire for more than 100 years. Russia declared that Belarusian is just a dialect of Russian. Many Belarusian patriots/nationalists took part in Polish uprisings and were killed/imprisoned by Russia. All Greek-Catholics were forced to return to Orthodox christianity. At the same time Galicia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia never were parts of Russia before 1939. Their population preserved strong Ukrainian identity and language and remained Greek-Catholic (mostly in Galicia).Mentality. Belarusians were/are mostly loyal to government policies in countries where they live(d). They are more patient, calm and ambivalent people than Ukrainians even now. Ukrainians historically tend to be free from any foreign dependancy and have very sharp feeling of injustice. Many Belarusians are just OK with current language situation. Some of them even state that Belarusian is a dialect of Russian.Modern policies. Instead of attempts to support the revival of Belarusian their president made Russian one more official language. As a result cities remain Russophone and rural population that resettles to cities is quickly russified. Belarusian is only occasionaly used in some official documents. At the same time Ukrainian was adopted as the only official language of Ukraine: almost all documents are in Ukrainian (except regions where ethnic minorities live), main TV and radio channels are in Ukrainian. As a result the revival of Ukrainian happens in central Ukraine, even in cities that were heavily russified in the past. In western Ukraine people predominantly speak Ukrainian even in big cities (fortunately Soviets didn’t have enough time to russify those cities). In eastern and southern Ukraine the situation is very similar to Belarus: Russian is the dominant language in cities and it is used as high level language by rural Ukrainophones who come to cities. However the fluency of Ukrainian is better in the cities of southern/eastern Ukraine than fluency of Belarusian is in Belarus. Almost every Russophone ethnic Ukrainian of Kyiv can switch to good enough Ukrainian when it is needed since they hear/read Ukrainian almost every day. In Kharkiv/Odesa it is maybe harder to find fluent speakers (except young generations). However people perfectly understand your Ukrainian here, unless it is some western dialect. I doubt that Belarusians in Minsk can do so.
Can a Ukrainian understand Belarusian without a translator? Would it work?
Oh, yes, absolutely. First of all, Ukrainian and Belarusian share a LOT of words that are either similar or even identical. According to the data that I recently read (and I am very sorry for forgetting where exactly did I read it), more than 80% of the most used daily-life words in these two languages are similar or identical.There is another important factor that also helps a lot: nearly every Ukrainian and Belarusian speaker today also understands Russian. This number is especially high in Belarus, where, I guess, nearly 100% of people speak Russian. In Ukraine almost everyone at least understands Russian, and the vast majority speak it at the level of the native language.Now, if you know both Ukrainian and Russian or both Belarusian and Russian, chances of mutual understanding between Ukrainian speakers and Belarusian speakers increase even more.A very typical situation at Ukrainian-Belarusian meetings is that people speak an insane mixture of three languages, and they understand each other perfectly.Russian is my first language. Ukrainian is my third language. I recently went to the evening of the Belarusian poetry, and I understood most of what was said in Belarusian.Reading Belarusian is even easier to me, because I have more time to reread those parts that are less obvious (and in most cases I intuitively guess the meaning out of context).There is a very widespread misconception — especially in Russia — that Belarusian is an accent of Russian. Hell no!When I came to the Belarusian city of Hrodna in 2012, I was spending most of my time among Belarusian speakers. Back then I did not know Ukrainian yet, and understanding Belarusian was actually pretty difficult.It became so much easier to understand Belarusian only after I started learning Ukrainian in 2014.I guess if I knew ONLY Ukrainian, without knowing Russian at all (though such combination is extreeeeeemely rare in the world, only among Ukrainian Canadians maybe), it might also have been more difficult to understand Belarusian.
What percentage of Ukrainian, Russian, and Belarusian are mutually intelligible?
Russian is my mother tongue. In my childhood I was 3 weeks in Ukraine in distant villages, where they did not use Russian, but understood. After a couple of weeks, I was free to understand what was said in Ukrainian, and I was understood when I spoke Russian. There was no language barrier. The structure of the Ukrainian and Russian languages are identical. Only some words differ.
What language is spoken in Belarus?
The situation in Belarus is similar to that of Ireland. In Ireland, for example, less than 1% of the population speak Irish as a first language. The situation isn’t that bad in Belarus, where Belarusian is spoken by about 10% of the population as first language. There aren’t clear statistics as Belarus does not publish official numbers for some reason.The situation in Belarus is that there are two official languages, Russian and Belarusian, but Russian is promoted in use much more than Belarusian. In fact, Russian is used everywhere and Belarusian is mostly reserved for bilingual inscriptions on government institutions, official documents, legal documents and in the education system, where Belarusian is taught to all students as a school subject, all the while Russian being the primary education language.The 10% who speak Bearusian natively are mostly farmers in villages far away from the cities and the very elderly, who were raised in Belarusian but are now mostly bilingual and may use both languages in different situations.In the early 20th century, Belarusian was actually spoken by well over 80% of the population, with Minsk being the only Russophone city, but extreme Russification policies during the Soviet era nearly brought the Belarusian language to extinction.This is in stark contrast to Ukraine, where Ukrainian is the sole official language, all formal education is in Ukrainian, most media is in Ukrainian and the percentage of people who speak Ukrainian as first language is 55–65%. Still not particulary high for a national language, but way higher than the percentage in Belarus, which is just around 10%.Also, fluency of the Ukrainian language is around 85% in Ukraine, regardless of being first or second language, while in Belarus only about 30% are fluent in Belarusian. 70% don’t have good enough knowledge of the language beyond what is taught in school, and even that knoweldge is mostly lost without constant exposure to the language, which you sadly don’t get in Belarus.