Why are there two Wikipedias in Belarusian? The two Belarusian orthographies and why this is a question of policy
You may have noticed that there can be two Wikipedias for (sort of) one and the same language: Norsk and Nunorsk for the two Norwegian written standards, a few Chinese Wikipedias. You can choose between Cyrillic and Latin scripts to read the edition of the site in Serbian. The same thing is with Belarusian – you see Беларуская and Беларуская (тарашкевіца) in the list of languages. Should you assume that each of the two orthographies is used by a half of the population or at least by a significant number of people?
The short answer is no – Belarusian is written (and spoken – there are some differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between the two norms, though very few) by almost everyone in the official orthography (Беларуская). The classical written standard (Беларуская (тарашкевіца)) is used by a few mass media (I managed to find four of them) and by a small number of Belarusian intelligentsia.
❓ Why is that so and why are there these two written norms in the first place?
❗ And now, my fellow nerds, it’s Belarusian language history time!
1. The establishment of the two orthographies
The first official orthography and the set of grammar rules in the newly independent Belarus were set in 1918 by a linguist Branislaw Tarashkyevich. It was called Taraškievica (after its author), or (later) the classic orthography. Between Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, both having been used before for writing Belarusian, Cyrillic script was chosen.
In 1933 a reform on Belarusian orthography was introduced. It was carried out by a commission in which no linguists were included; the reasons for the reform were almost exclusively political: the first orthography brought Belarusian closer to Polish, and the politics of Russification was being pursued in the USSR and similar reforms took place in other USSR minority languages to assimilate them into Russian culture and language. Unlike Taraškievica, the new official orthography (or “Narkamauka”, as it is informally known, after народны камісарыят, People’s Comissariat) didn’t represent phonetic peculiarities of the Belarusian language as well as the previous orthography did, bringing some of the language norms closer to the Russian ones.
In 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union some mass media began using Taraškievica again. But in early 2000s many of them went back to the official written norm; I can’t positively say what the real reasons for that were.
From one point of view, the reasons were quite simple: Belarusian language teachers wanted to use books, newspapers and TV programmes to teach children Belarusian, so it was better to use one variant of orthography to avoid confusion. An editor of a newspaper in Belarusian explained it as a measure to attract new readers, that had had problems reading the paper in the classical orthography. People of different political views adhere to this point of view.
Another point of view claims that those were political reasons. The fact is that writing in old Taraškievica, as well as speaking Belarusian, using the old white-red-white flag and the “Pahonia” coat of arms are all aimed at alienation from the Soviet past, when people were discouriged from using their native languages instead of Russian. On the contrary, the state policy now doesn’t tend to alienate from it: for example, the state symbols are the reformed Soviet ones, and the Russian language is mostly used officially. The opinion of those people is that the reason for the change was pressure from the authorities.
Aaaand here come political quarrels and fights, let’s leave the topic.
I think that the people who write and edit Wikipedia pretty much fall under the description of intelligentsia (regardless of political views) – that is, those who are interested in language, culture, and science, who care about what happens around them and are ready to do things voluntarily and create something.That’s why there you have it – an entire edition of Wikipedia in the written norm that very few people in the country know anything about – by the way, the edition that was founded before the one in the official orthography.
3. So if the changes were unnatural and imposed, should we go back to the classical norm?
Alright, let’s get back to linguistics.
That’s a difficult question. Some reasons why we should:
