The current Cyrillic alphabet differs minimally from the alphabet used for the Russian language. The six inflectional cases are nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, and prepositional. Verbals have two conjugations distinguishing first, second, and third persons, singular and plural, thus independent personal pronouns are used only for emphasis. Many perfective forms are constructed using particles prefixed to the infinitive. In syntax, main verbs agree in person and number with their subjects.
Adjectives agree in person, gender, and case with the noun they modify.
Word order is grammatically free with no particular fixed order for constituents marking subject, object, possessor, etc. The inflectional system takes care of keeping clear grammatical relations and roles. Constituents with old information precede constituents with new information, or those that carry most emphasis. Modern Belarusian has 10 vowel phonemes divided into two sets, one called hard, the other soft, and a consonantal system of 24-25 phonemes. Soft vowels palatalize certain following consonants.