Belarusian phonology
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 ). 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. Distinctive features 
As an East Slavic language, Belarusian phonology is very similar to both Russian and Ukrainian phonology. The primary differences are:
 Akannye () – the merger of unstressed  into . The pronunciation of the merged vowel is a clear open front unrounded vowel , including after soft consonants and . In standard Russian akanye, the merger happens only after hard consonants; after soft consonants,  merges with  instead. Ukrainian does not have this merger at all. In Belarusian, unlike Russian, this change is reflected in spelling: compare  "head", pronounced , with Russian   and Ukrainian  . Lack of ikanye (the Russian sound change in which unstressed  has merged with , and unstressed  and  with  after soft consonants). Instead, unstressed  merges with  (yakannye). Compare Belarusian   with Russian   and Ukrainian .Not all instances of  are subject to yakannye in literary Belarusian, for example   instead of па́ляц , which occurs only dialectally. Tsyekannye () and dzyekannye () – the pronunciation of Old East Slavic  as soft affricates . This occurs in  "ten", pronounced ; compare Russian  , Ukrainian  .Many Russian speakers similarly affricate phonemic , but this is not universal and not written. Relatively stronger palatalization of  and . Postalveolar consonants are all hard (laminal retroflex), whereas Russian has both hard and soft postalveolars. has hardened and merged with . Unlike in standard Russian, historical  before consonants has merged with  and is pronounced . This is reflected in the spelling, which uses a special symbol known as "non-syllabic u" (), written as an  with a breve diacritic on top of it: ,? . ? Lenition of  to  similarly to Ukrainian, Czech, or Slovak, and unlike Russian and Polish. Proto-Slavic  shifted to Belarusian and Russian  before a hard consonant. Compare the Belarusian word for "green",  , and the Russian word,  , with Ukrainian  . 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:  ,  . Other borrowed words have the fricative pronunciation:   ('geography'). In addition,  and  are allophones of  and  respectively, when voiced by regressive assimilation, as in   'train station'. In the syllable coda,  is pronounced  or , forming diphthongs, and is spelled . sometimes derives etymologically from , as with   ('wolf'), which comes from Proto-Slavic . Similar to Ukrainian, there are also alternations between  and  in the past tense of verbs: for example,   "(he) thought" versus   "(she) thought". This evolved historically from a spelling with -л () which vocalized like the  in Polish (cognate , "he mused"). The geminated variations are transcribed as follows:
  
  
  
  
  
  
  . References

Bibliography

Further reading 

 

Phonology
Slavic phonologies