The Russian–Belarusian bilingualism in the Republic of Belarus today and the problems of pre-school education

Abstract

The Republic of Belarus is at the moment the only mainly Slavonic state that recognizes official bilingualism with the Belarusian and Russian languages. Recent research in social sciences has characterized Belarus as a “borderland”, and linguistic research also adopts this perspective. The linguistic situation in Belarus can be described as bilingualism between two extremely closely related Slavonic languages. Belarusian and Russian have similar grammatical structure with few significant differences between them (even if different kinds of orthographies consider the same grammatical features in different ways). The most distinctive features are pronunciation of some historical phonemes, a different principle of orthography and unique Belarusian vocabulary. There are also some different constructions such as смяяцца з каго, дзякаваць каму, чакаць па нядзелях and stylistic discrepancies.В статье дается краткий исторический обзор становления государственного двуязычия в РБ, рассматриваются метод и особенности методики обучения детей дошкольного возраста белорусскому языку, развития белорусской речи в ситуации близкородственного двуязычия в условиях доминирования русского языка.