Връзката на белоруския книжовен език със съседните славянски езици

A peculiarity of the history of Standard Byelorussian is its development under the conditions of written bilingualism and even multilingualism. Early Byelorussian-Church Slavonic bilingualism in the second part of the sixteenth century was complemented by Polish and Latin which gradually pushed aside Byelorussian in the middle of the seventeenth century. After the unification of Byelorussia and Russia Polish and Latin went out of use and the Russian language became dominant in Byelorussia. At the same time a new Standard Byelorussian began to appear on a folk-dialect basis along which it preserved, especially in its lexicon, traces of former interrelationships with the other languages.