Colloquial Belarusian: analytical criteria

Abstract

The article looks at present-day Belarusian. The author sets out to determine the defining criteria of colloquial Belarusian, which turn out to rely on the choice of informants, choice of empirical data and interpretation of certain phonetic phenomena. The analysis is based on colloquial language used in everyday communication by language and literature specialists. The observations focus on a group of words (няма, няхай, не, мяне, цябе, цяпер) from the top 300 most frequent Belarusian words.