🇷🇺 → 🇧🇾

How easy is Belarusian for Russian speakers?

Going from Russian to Belarusian (Беларуская) has a composite linguistic distance of 11% (curated lexical data). Below is the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.

11% distance FSI Cat III — ~1,100 hours

Lexical similarity

80%

Shared vocabulary, cognates, and loanwords.

Grammatical distance

98%

Morphology, syntax, word order, cases.

Phonological similarity

67%

Shared sounds and phoneme inventory.

Writing-system match

100%

Cyrillic → Cyrillic

Genealogical kinship

100%

Indo-European ↔ Indo-European

Open the interactive comparison →

Sample sentences side-by-side

How everyday sentences look in both languages:

🇷🇺 Russian

Весна приносит тепло и свет после долгой зимы.

🇧🇾 Belarusian

Вясна прыносіць цяпло і святло пасля доўгай зімы.

🇷🇺 Russian

Студент читает книги и учится в университете каждый день.

🇧🇾 Belarusian

Студэнт чытае кнігі і вучыцца ва ўніверсітэце кожны дзень.

Curated cognates between Russian and Belarusian

Word pairs that share a common etymological root — instantly recognisable across both languages:

water

вада (vada) ↔ вода (voda)
house

дом (dom) ↔ дом (dom)

Other easy languages for Russian speakers

The 5 languages with the lowest linguistic distance from Russian:

Think you can tell them apart?

A quick 3-question check between Russian and Belarusian. No signup.