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. Also characteristic is the series of four affricates and nine fricatives.
Stress is moveable and can occur on any syllable.
The Belarusian language was considerably affected by Soviet language policies from the 1920s until the end of the 1980s. The number of Belarusian language books and newspapers declined during the Soviet period. Since the breakup of the USSR, and the establishment of Belarus as an independent country, official policy toward the language of Belarusian has changed. As the national language, use of Belarusian is now actively encouraged in government, the media, and education. In the early fourteenth century, the territory of modern Belarus and parts of Poland were incorporated into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.