Belarusian phonology

The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is not absolute agreement on the number of phonemes, so that rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars.

Many consonants may form pairs that differ only in palatalization (called hard vs soft consonants, the latter being represented in the IPA with the symbol $⟨⟩$). In some of such pairs, the place of articulation is additionally changed (see distinctive features below). There are also unpaired consonants that have no corollary in palatalization.

Distinctive features
As an East Slavic language, Belarusian phonology is very similar to Russian phonology, and also rather similar to Ukrainian phonology. The primary differences are:
 * Akannye (аканне) – the merger of unstressed into .  Unlike in standard Russian (akanye), the pronunciation of the merged vowel is a clear open front unrounded vowel, including after soft consonants and . (Ukrainian does not have this merger at all.)
 * Lack of ikanye. Unlike in Russian (but as in Ukrainian), there is no merger of unstressed  and, and no merger of unstressed  with  after soft consonants.
 * Unlike in Russian, there is no emphasized separation after the in the pronunciation of the iotified, ,  and.
 * Tsyekannye (цеканне) and dzyekannye (дзеканне) – the pronunciation of Old East Slavic as soft affricates . (Note that many Russian speakers similarly affricate phonemic, but this is not universal and not written.)
 * Relatively stronger palatalization of and.
 * Postalveolar consonants are all hard (laminal retroflex) while Russian and Ukrainian have both hard and soft postalveolars.
 * has hardened and merged with.
 * Unlike in standard Russian, phonemic and  merge as  syllable-finally.  This is reflected in the spelling, which uses a special symbol known as "non-syllabic u" (у нескладовae), written as an ‹u› with a breve diacritic on top of it: ‹ў›,? ‹ŭ›.?

Note also that, unlike in Russian, Belarusian spelling closely represents surface phonology rather than the underlying morphophonology. For example, akannye, tsyekannye, dzyekannye and the allophone of  and  are all written. The representation of akannye in particular introduces striking differences between Russian and Belarusian orthography.

Vowels
As with Russian, is not a separate phoneme, but an allophone of  occurring after non-palatalized consonants.

Consonants
The consonants of Belarusian are as follows:

Similar to Dutch, the rare phonemes and  are present only in several borrowed words (ганак, гузік , гандаль ), however, other borrowed words may still have the fricative pronunciation: геаграфія  ('geography').

As a syllable coda, is pronounced  (, forming diphthongs) and is spelled $\langleў\rangle$. There are also alternations between and this post-vocalic ; though restricted to the past tense of verbs,  may derive etymologically from  as with воўк  ('wolf'), which comes from Proto-Slavic *vьlkъ (as with Dutch goud "gold").

The geminated variations are transcribed as follows:
 * падарожжа
 * ззяць
 * стагоддзе
 * каханне
 * рассячы
 * ліхалецце
 * сярэднявечча.