Belarusian (ISO 639-3 BEL) is an Eastern Slavic language spoken by roughly seven million people in the Republic of Belarus (Zaprudski 2007, Census of the Republic of Belarus 2009), a land-locked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest (Figure 1). Within the Belarusian language, the two main dialects are North Eastern and South Western (Avanesaǔ et al. 1963, Lapkoǔskaya 2008, Smolskaya 2011). Two additional regional forms of Belarusian can be distinguished: the Middle Belarusian dialectal group, incorporating some features of North Eastern and South Western dialects together with certain characteristics of its own, and the West-Polesian (or Brest-Pinsk) dialectal group. The latter group is more distinct linguistically from the other Belarusian dialects and is in many respects close to the Ukrainian language (Lapkoǔskaya 2008, Smolskaya 2011). The focus of this illustration is Standard Belarusian, which is based on Middle Belarusian speech varieties. For details on the phonetic differences across dialects, the reader is referred to Avanesaǔ et al. (1963) and Lapkoǔskaya (2008).

中文翻译：

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白俄罗斯语

白俄罗斯语 (ISO 639-3 BEL) 是一种东斯拉夫语言，在白俄罗斯共和国约有 700 万人使用（Zaprudski 2007，白俄罗斯共和国人口普查 2009），东欧的一个内陆国家，与俄罗斯接壤北部和东部，南部是乌克兰，西部是波兰，西北部是立陶宛和拉脱维亚（图 1）。在白俄罗斯语中，两种主要方言是东北方言和西南方言（Avanesaǔ et al. 1963, Lapkoǔskaya 2008, Smolskaya 2011）。可以区分另外两种白俄罗斯语的区域形式：中白俄罗斯方言群，结合了东北方言和西南方言的一些特征以及其自身的某些特征，以及西波兰语（或布列斯特-平斯克）方言群。后一组在语言上与其他白俄罗斯方言更加不同，并且在许多方面接近乌克兰语（Lapkoǔskaya 2008，Smolskaya 2011）。这幅插图的重点是标准白俄罗斯语，它基于白俄罗斯中部的语音变体。有关方言之间语音差异的详细信息，请参阅 Avanesaǔ et al。(1963) 和 Lapkoǔskaya (2008)。