In the 13th and 14th century an increasing number of texts, mainly official records and other types of documents, show phonetic, grammatical and lexical characteristics regarded as typically Belarusian.

[5] Rebulgarisation made Church Slavonic even less comprehensible to the population at large than it already was due to its complex syntax structures and its high share of abstract lexicon.

This and the political rise of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with its Slavic majority population contributed to the emergence of a written language on an autochthonous East Slavonic basis.

[6] It was the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was used in particular by the authorities, in offices and in diplomatic correspondence, but in the course of time it entered former "exclusive" domains of Church Slavonic as well.

In contemporary sources it was referred to as "ruskij jazyk", which serves pro-Russian linguistic historiography as an argument to claim it as a part of the history of the Russian language.

After the Partitions of Poland initially Polish remained the social dominant language in Belarus being more and more replaced in this role by Russian, in particular after the November Uprising.

As a school subject and language of instruction Belarusian was first introduced under German occupation in the district Ober Ost, which existed from 1915 to 1918.

[11] In the early 1930s Soviet state and party leaders began their ideological struggle against alleged "local nationalisms", putting an end to Belarusization and resulting in grave repressions and physical elimination of the pro-Belarusian intelligentsiya in the 1930s and 1940s.

[13] Of great importance for the development of the linguistic situation in the decades after World War II were the industrialisation and urbanization of the BSSR, part of which became the Western Belarusian territories formerly belonging to Poland.

For the first time Belarusians became the majority population in the urban centers, in which Russian, Jewish and Polish influences had prevailed before World War II.

Specialists from the RSFSR as well as other Russian-speaking "non-Belarusians" often held leadership positions in the post-war BSSR, thus contributing to the role of Russian as the language of social advance.

[17] This policy, however, was rejected by large parts of the society, and this prompted Alexander Lukashenko to take up the issue of allegedly "forceful Belarusization" in his first presidential campaign in 1994.

After being elected, in 1995 Lukashenko initiated a controversial referendum in which according to official data 88.3% of the participants supported an equal status for the Russian and Belarusian language.