Background

Language family: Indo-European / Slavic / East

Also referred to as Belarusian or White Russian, it is spoken in Belarus, parts of Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.

Phonology

Consonants

	Place of Articulation
Manner of Articulation	Labial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar
Stops (plain)	p b	t d			k
Stops (palatalized)	pʲ bʲ				kʲ
Affricates (plain)		ts dz	tʃ dʒ
Affricates (palatalized)		tsʲ dzʲ
Fricatives (plain)	f v	s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ
Fricatives (palatalized)	fʲ vʲ	sʲ zʲ			xʲ ɣʲ
Nasals (plain)	m	n
Nasals (palatalized)	mʲ	nʲ
Trills		r
Approximants (plain)		l		j
Approximants (palatalized)		lʲ
Note: For phonemes that share a cell, those on the left are voiceless and those on the right are voiced.

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Mid	ɛ		o
Low		a

Alphabet

⟨Ґ⟩, representing /ɡ/, was officially removed from the Belarusan language during the orthography reform in 1933 (Buk, Mačutek, and Rovenchak 2008, 2).

Grapheme	Phoneme	Comment
а	/a/
б	/b/
в	/v/
г	/ɣ/
д	/d/
е	/jɛ/
ё	/jo/
ж	/ʒ/
з	/z/
i	/ji/
й	/j/
к	/k/
л	/l/
м	/m/
н	/n/
о	/o/
п	/p/
р	/r/
с	/s/
т	/t/
у	/u/
ў	/u/	realized as [w], but understood as an allophone of /u/ (Dreer 2012, 73)
ф	/f/
х	/x/
ц	/ts/
ч	/tʃ/
ш	/ʃ/
ы	/i/	realized as [ɨ], but understood as an allophone of /i/ (Dreer 2012, 73)
ь		indicates palatalization of the preceding consonant
э	/ɛ/
ю	/ju/
я	/ja/
’		indicates separation of sounds (non-palatalization of preceding consonant)
Digraph
дж	/dʒ/
дз	/dz/

Misc. Rules

Within the Slavic languages, it’s common for /ɡ/ to lenite to /ɣ/ (Nichols 2018, 1607); although it seems as if Belarusan has permanently implemented this change.
Palatalized consonants precede ⟨я⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨ё⟩, ⟨ю⟩, ⟨i⟩ (Dreer 2012, 73).
Gemination of some consonants occurs (Boček 2012, 166).

References

Boček, Vít. 2012. “On the Relationship Between Gemination and Palatalization in Early Romance Loanwords in Common Slavic.” Journal of Slavic Linguistics 20 (2): 151–70. doi:10.1353/jsl.2012.0009.

Buk, S., J. Mačutek, and A. Rovenchak. 2008. “Some properties of the Ukrainian writing system.” arXiv E-Prints, February.

Dreer, Igor. 2012. “The Human Factor of Economy of Effort Cross-Linguistically: A Contrastive Analysis of the Phonotactic Distribution of Consonants in Belarusian and French Monosyllabic Words.” In Monosyllables: From Phonology to Typology, edited by Thomas Stolz, Nicole Nau, and Cornelia Stroh. Studia Typologica 12. Berlin: Akad.-Verl.

Nichols, Johanna. 2018. “86. the Evolution of Slavic.” In Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, edited by Jared Klein, Brian Joseph, and Matthias Fritz, 1600–1621. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. doi:10.1515/9783110542431-007.

Belarusan