The phonological system of the modern Belarusian language consists of at least 44 phonemes: 5 vowels and 39 consonants. Consonants may also be geminated. There is no absolute agreement on the number of phonemes; rarer or contextually variant sounds are included by some scholars. Many consonants may form pairs that differ only in palatalization (called hard vs soft consonants, the latter being represented in the IPA with the symbol ⟨ʲ⟩). In some of such pairs, the place of articulation is additionally changed (see distinctive features below). There are also unpaired consonants that have no corollary in palatalization. Allophonies are rare to non-existent.

Distinctive features

As an East Slavic language, Belarusian phonology is very similar to both Russian and Ukrainian phonology. The primary differences are: Unlike in Russian but like in Ukrainian, Belarusian spelling closely represents surface phonology rather than the underlying morphophonology. For example, akannye, tsyekannye, dzyekannye and the allophone of and are all written. The representation of akannye in particular introduces striking differences between Russian and Belarusian orthography.

Vowels

As with Russian, is not a separate phoneme, but an allophone of occurring after non-palatalized consonants.

Consonants

The consonants of Belarusian are as follows: The rare phonemes and are present only in several borrowed words: ганак, гузік. Other borrowed words have the fricative pronunciation: геаграфія ('geography'). In addition, and are allophones of and respectively, when voiced by regressive assimilation, as in вакзал 'train station'. In the syllable coda, is pronounced or, forming diphthongs, and is spelled ⟨ў⟩. sometimes derives etymologically from, as with воўк ('wolf'), which comes from Proto-Slavic *vьlkъ. Similar to Ukrainian, there are also alternations between and in the past tense of verbs: for example, ду́маў "(he) thought" versus ду́мала "(she) thought". This evolved historically from a form with (as in Russian: ду́мал) which vocalized like the Ł in Polish (cognate dumał, "he mused"). The geminated variations are transcribed as follows: