Russian language in Belarus
Introduction Russian is one of the two official languages of Belarus (the other being Belarusian). Being dominant in the media, education and other areas of public life, Russian is ''de facto'' the main language of the country.
Distribution per 1897 census + Excerpt from the Russian Empire Census results Guberniya* Total Population Belarusian (Бѣлорусскій)  Russian (Великорусскій) Polish (Польскій) Vilna 1,591,207  891,903 78,623 130,054 Vitebsk 1,489,246 987,020 198,001 50,377 Grodno 1,603,409 1,141,714 74,143 161,662 Minsk 2,147,621 1,633,091 83,999 64,617 Mogilev 1,686,764 1,389,782 58,155 17,526 Smolensk 1,525,279 100,757 1,397,875 7,314 '''* See also:'''  Administrative-territorial division of Belarus and bordering lands in 2nd half 19 cent. (right half-page) and  Ethnical composition of Belarus and bordering lands (prep. by Mikola Bich on the basis of 1897 data)
After 1995 In 1995, according to the results of the 1995 Belarusian Referendum, the Russian language was declared the second official language. According to the Belarus Census (2009),  41.5% of the Belarusian population declared Russian as their mother language whereas Belarusian is the mother tongue of 53.2% of the population, and 70.2% declared Russian "the language spoken at home" (the second language-related question of the Census). However, minorities do speak Polish, Ukrainian and Eastern Yiddish as well.
See also * Russians in Belarus * Demographics of Belarus* Russification of Belarus
References
External links *  Калита И. В. Современная Беларусь: языки и национальная идентичность. Ústí nad Labem, , 2010, 300 s.*  Yu. Koryakov, A Typology of Linguistic Situations and Linguistic Situation in Belarus, a Ph.D. thesis, 2002, Moscow State University