Belarusian orthography is mainly based on the Belarusian folk dialects of the Minsk-Vilnius region, such as they were at the beginning of the 20th century.
Initially, Belarusian grammar was formalised by notable Belarusian linguist Branislaw Tarashkyevich and first printed in Vil'nya (1918).
Historically, there had existed several other alternative Belarusian grammars.
E.g., the word "лесам", which is the instrumental of "лес" — forest, may grammatically mean: There are six cases in Belarusian: Historically, there also existed a vocative case (Belarusian: клічны, BGN/PCGN: klichny), but it is used only sparingly in modern Belarusian, like Slovene, Slovak and the closely related Russian, generally in literature, and usually is not mentioned in textbooks.
For nouns (Belarusian: назоўнікі, BGN/PCGN: nazowniki) there are several types of declension: There are eight types of pronouns (Belarusian: займеннікі, BGN/PCGN: zaymyenniki) in Belarusian: які (which), каторы (which), чый (whose), колькі (how much) той (that); такі, гэтакі (such, of this kind); столькі, гэтулькі (that much) Note: proper names and places' names are rendered in BGN/PCGN