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 no absolute agreement on the number of phonemes; 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 ⟨ʲ⟩). 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. Allophonies are rare to non-existent.

Distinctive features
As an East Slavic language, Belarusian phonology is very similar to both Russian and Ukrainian phonology. The primary differences are:
 * Akannye (аканне) – the merger of unstressed into . The pronunciation of the merged vowel is a clear open front unrounded vowel, including after soft consonants and . In standard Russian akanye, the merger happens only after hard consonants; after soft consonants,  merges with  instead. Ukrainian does not have this merger at all. In Belarusian, unlike Russian, this change is reflected in spelling: compare  "head", pronounced , with Russian   and Ukrainian.
 * Lack of ikanye (the Russian sound change in which unstressed has merged with, and unstressed  and  with  after soft consonants). Instead, unstressed  merges with  (yakannye). Compare Belarusian   with Russian   and Ukrainian . Not all instances of  are subject to yakannye in literary Belarusian, for example   instead of па́ляц , which occurs only dialectally. In standard Belarusian, yakannye after palatalized consonants occurs in the syllable immediately preceding the tonic syllable:   "song" —   "singer" —   "singers". Exceptions are allowed in loanwords:   "medal".
 * Tsyekannye (цеканне) and dzyekannye (дзеканне) – the pronunciation of Old East Slavic as soft affricates . This occurs in  "ten", pronounced ; compare Russian , Ukrainian  . 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), whereas Russian has both hard and soft postalveolars.
 * has hardened and merged with.
 * Unlike in standard Russian, historical before consonants has merged with  and is pronounced . 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: $⟨ў⟩$,? $⟨ŭ⟩$.? For example: Belarusian воўк  — Russian волк . The merger did not occur before suffixes (before historical ⟨ъ⟩ in the word middle): Russian and Belarusian палка  "stick".
 * Lenition of to  similarly to Ukrainian, Czech, or Slovak, and unlike Russian and Polish.
 * Proto-Slavic shifted to Belarusian and Russian  before a hard consonant. Compare the Belarusian word for "green", , and the Russian word,  , with Ukrainian.

Unlike in Russian but like in Ukrainian, 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:

The rare phonemes and  are present only in several borrowed words: ганак, гузік. Other borrowed words have the fricative pronunciation: геаграфія ('geography'). In addition, and  are allophones of  and  respectively, when voiced by regressive assimilation, as in вакзал  'train station'.

In the syllable coda, is pronounced  or, forming diphthongs, and is spelled $⟨ў⟩$. sometimes derives etymologically from, as with воўк ('wolf'), which comes from Proto-Slavic *vьlkъ. Similar to Ukrainian, there are also alternations between and  in the past tense of verbs: for example, ду́маў  "(he) thought" versus ду́мала  "(she) thought". This evolved historically from a form with (as in Russian: ду́мал) which vocalized like the Ł in Polish (cognate dumał, "he mused").

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