Locale Be By

Reference data for the Belarusian (Belarus) locale — endonym Беларуская (Беларусь), written in the Cyrillic script, left-to-right (LTR).

Identifiers

• BCP 47 tag: be-BY
• ISO 639-1: be
• ISO 639-3: bel
• Script: Cyrl (Cyrillic)
• Region: BY (Belarus)
• Text direction: ltr — left-to-right (LTR)

Speakers (approximate)

• L1 (native): 5,000,000
• L2 (additional): 1,300,000
• L1+L2 (total): 6,300,000

Base locale

This is a regional variant of Locale Be 001 (Belarusian), the base/macro locale for this language.

Pluralization

CLDR plural categories for this locale: one, few, many, other (4 forms).

• one — n % 10 = 1 and n % 100 != 11 (e.g. 1, 21, 31, 41, …)
• few — n % 10 = 2..4 and n % 100 != 12..14 (e.g. 2~4, 22~24, 32~34, 42~44, …)
• many — n % 10 = 0 or n % 10 = 5..9 or n % 100 = 11..14 (e.g. 0, 5~19, 100, 1000, …)
• other — everything else

See Unicode Messageformat for writing plural messages using these categories.

Translating into this locale

Apply Locale Be 001 with the conventions of Belarus.

• Context: Belarusian and Russian are both official, and Russian dominates daily use. Content in Belarusian should be complete and not a thin Russian translation.
• Formats: Belarusian ruble (Br); dates 17.10.2026; 24-hour clock; decimal comma.
• Orthography: state publications use the official orthography (narkamaŭka); media and cultural groups sometimes use Taraškievica. Confirm the project's choice.

Common pitfalls

• Mixing the two orthographies.
• Providing machine-translated Belarusian from Russian.
• The general pitfalls in Locale Be 001 also apply.

Learn more

• Locale for BCP 47 identifiers, locale-sensitive formatting, pluralization, and text-direction concepts that apply across all locales.
• Unicode Messageformat for writing plural/selection messages correctly for this locale's grammar.
• Unicode CLDR locale data for number, date, and currency formats (https://cldr.unicode.org)