Belarusian Language - History

History

The modern Belarusian language was redeveloped on the base of the vernacular spoken remnants of the Old Belarusian language, surviving in the ethnic Belarusian territories in the 19th century. The end 18th century (the times of the Divisions of Commonwealth) is the usual conventional borderline between the Old Belarusian language and Modern Belarusian language stages of development.

By the end 18th century, the (Old) Belarusian language was still common among the smaller nobility in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (GDL). Jan Czeczot in 1840s had mentioned that even his generation’s grandfathers preferred speaking (Old) Belarusian. (According to A. N. Pypin, the Belarusian language was spoken in some areas among the smaller nobility during the 19th century.) In its vernacular form, it was the language of the smaller town dwellers and of the peasantry and it had been the language of the oral forms of the folklore. The teaching in Belarusian was conducted mainly in schools run by the Basilian order.

The development of the Belarusian language in the 19th century was strongly influenced by the political conflict in the territories of the former GDL, between the Russian Imperial authorities, trying to consolidate their rule over the "joined provinces" and the Polish and Polonised nobility, trying to bring back its pre-Partitions rule (see also: Polonization in times of Partitions).

One of the important manifestations of this conflict was the struggle for the ideological control over the educational system. The Polish and Russian language were being introduced and re-introduced, while the general state of the people's education remained poor until the very end of the Russian Empire.

Summarily, the first two decades of the 19th century had seen the unprecedented prosperity of the Polish culture and language in the former GDL lands, had prepared the era of such famous "Belarusians by birth – Poles by choice," as Mickiewicz and Syrokomla. The era had seen the effective completion of the Polonization of the smallest nobility, the further reduction of the area of use of the contemporary Belarusian language, and the effective folklorization of the Belarusian culture.

Due both to the state of the people's education and to the strong positions of Polish and Polonized nobility, it was only since the 1880s–1890s, that the educated Belarusian element, still shunned because of "peasant origin", began to appear in the state offices.

In 1846, ethnographer Shpilevskiy prepared the Belarusian grammar (using Cyrillic alphabet) on the basis of the folk dialects of the Minsk region. However, the Russian Academy of Sciences refused to print his submission, on the basis that it had not been prepared in a sufficiently scientific manner.

Since the mid-1830s, the ethnographical works began to appear, and the tentative attempts to study the language were instigated (e.g., Belarusian grammar by Shpilevskiy). The Belarusian literature tradition began to re-form, basing on the folk language, initiated by the works of Vintsent Dunin-Martsinkyevich. See also: Jan Czeczot, Jan Barszczewski.

In the beginning of the 1860s, both Russian and Polish parties in Belarusian lands had begun to realise that the decisive role in the upcoming conflicts was shifting to the peasantry, overwhelmingly Belarusian. So, a large amount of propaganda appeared, targeted at the peasantry and prepared in the Belarusian language. Notably, the anti-Russian, anti-Tsarist, anti-Orthodox "Manifest" and the newspaper "Peasants' Truth" (1862–1863) by Kalinowski, the anti-Polish, anti-Revolutionary, pro-Orthodox booklets and poems (1862).

The advent of the all-Russian "narodniki" and Belarusian national movements (end 1870s – beg. 1880s) renewed interest in the Belarusian language (see also: Homan (1884), Bahushevich, Yefim Karskiy, Dovnar-Zapol'skiy, Bessonov, Pypin, Sheyn, Nosovich). The Belarusian literary tradition was renewed, too (see also: F. Bahushevich). It was in these times that F. Bahushevich made his famous appeal to Belarusians: "Do not forsake our language, lest you pass away" (Belarusian: Не пакідайце ж мовы нашай, каб не ўмёрлі).

In course of the 1897 Russian Empire Census, about 5.89 million people declared themselves speakers of the Belarusian language.

The end of the 19th century however still showed that the urban language of Belarusian towns remained either Polish or Russian and in the same census towns exceeding 50000 had Belarusian speakers of less than a tenth. This state of affairs greatly contributed to a perception that Belarusian is a "rural" and "uneducated" language.

However the census was a major breakthrough for the first steps of the Belarusian national self-conscience and identity, as it clearly showed to the Imperial authorities, and the still strong Polish minority that the population and the language was neither Polish nor Russian.