Language code: be

Technical information about ISO 639 language code be

The table below provides technical details for the Belarusian language, designated by the be code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

be

Name

Official

Belarusian

Native

Беларуская мова

Family
East Slavic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Northeastern BelarusianCentral BelarusianSouthwestern Belarusian
Related languages
RussianUkrainianRusyn
Key facts
Uses the unique letter “Ў/ў”, absent in other Slavic Cyrillic alphabetsPossesses two competing orthographies: classical Taraškievica and official NarkamaukaFrancysk Skaryna printed one of the first East-Slavic books (1517) in BelarusianVocabulary shows heavy historical borrowing from Polish alongside Russian influenceThe language preserves the Proto-Slavic nasal vowel *ǫ as a distinct sound written ‹ў› or ‹ў› in some dialects.
Sample phrase

Прывітанне, як ты?

Character encodings

ISO 8859-5, Windows 1251, UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Belarusian belongs to the Indo-European family of languages, more specifically, to the East Slavic subgroup. It is one of the official languages of Belarus and recognized as a minority language in certain areas of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine. It is written in the Cyrillic script (Belarusian alphabet). It is estimated that there are more than 5.1 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

200K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Belarusian speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

be-BY Belarusian (Belarus)

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