The Journal of Byelorussian Studies
Vol. IV, No. 2

BYELORUSSIAN ORTHOGRAPHY:
FROM THE 1933 REFORM TO THE PRESENT DAY 
by P.J. Mayo

The foundation of the grammatical and orphographical systems of the modern Byelorussian literary language were laid by Tarashkievich in his Bielaruskaja hramatyka dla shkol, the first edition of which was published in Vilna in 1918. At that time the grammar and orthography of literary Byelorussian were characterised by a considerable degree of arbitrariness...

...in 1933 the Council of People's Commissars published a decree entitled Ab zmienach i sprashchenni bielaruskaha pravapisa. By this time political considerations had superseded linguistic ones...The introduction to the 1933 decree leaves us in no doubts..: <...Byelorussian national democracy, proceeding from its bourgeois, counter-revolutionary aims, has carried out its subversive saboteurs' work on both the economic and the cultural front, including the sphere of language...
 
...With the aims of the decisive eradication from Byelorussian orthography of national-democratic influences and distortions, ... the Council of People's Commissars of the BSSR decrees the introduction into the existing orthography of the following reforms...>

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