What do you do when you hear a Belarusian word you don’t know, Google it, and find absolutely nothing? Could it be a made-up word, or did someone make a mistake? Or maybe it just isn’t on the internet? That can happen, especially with dialect words, regional vocabulary, or even forms that survive only among older speakers in a few villages.
In the new episode of “The Rheme Catcher,” Zhenya and Uladzik (Uladzislau Harbacki – a sociolinguist and gender studies scholar) talk about where to look for words like these, how to verify them, and why a simple web search may not be enough.
And if you’re looking to read more by Uladzislau, you can find his books here.
After one of the earlier episodes, listeners picked up on the word vodbitsa. Search for it, and all that comes up is “Vodbitsa,” described as “a small river, a tributary of the Dnieper.” That raised a question: had the podcast hosts got it wrong when they used the word in a different sense?
They hadn’t. Vodbitsa really is a small river, running through a hollow that is unusually deep by Belarusian standards. In the local dialect, the river’s name was also used as a geographical reference point: people might say, for example, pad Vodbitsu paitsi (head towards the Vodbitsa) – meaning to go in the direction of the river. Over time, though, the name acquired a figurative meaning as well. The hollow through which the Vodbitsa runs became a local point of comparison for similar depressions. This gave rise to the expression vodbitsy pad vachyma, used for deep bags under the eyes – as though they were little hollows in the face.
This is not something one person simply made up or a one-off coinage, but a word used by a small local community. According to Uladzik, it was used in several villages in the Orsha area – Bryli, Krapiuna and Siahlava – but even there it is gradually disappearing. Older people still knew the word in this sense, while younger speakers may know Vodbitsa only as the name of the river. Especially since even a simple web search turns up only the geographical feature, with no trace of the word’s meaning in the local dialect.
Another listener sent in a different word: zbiyodats. She remembered it from the way her grandmother, who was from the Biarezina District, used to speak. What makes the word particularly interesting is how her grandmother used it: according to the listener’s recollection, she would say zbiyodats when she meant “to lose, destroy or waste something.” Uladzik knows a similar form from the Vitebsk and Orsha areas, but with an a: zbayodats. Dialect dictionaries record other forms too, including zbiyodats and even zbyyodats. This kind of variation is typical of dialects: the same word can sound slightly different from one local variety to another while retaining the same meaning.
To explore the meaning of the word more closely, Uladzislau gives a few examples from a dialect he knows well. Someone might say, “You zbayodau all our money” – in other words, you squandered it. The word can also be used more figuratively. A woman might say that a man had zbayodau the best years of her life – that, in effect, he had stolen those years from her. Another word is zbayoda, used for someone who throws money around. A similar word is raskidzyokha. It is a common-gender noun, so it can refer to either a man or a woman.
If a word doesn’t turn up on Google, that doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist. It may simply never have made its way into a well-indexed digital source. Belarusian dialect vocabulary extends far beyond what can easily be found online. That is why linguists don’t rely on a single source. They work with many different kinds of material: dialect dictionaries, older and more recent regional publications, manuscript dictionaries and archival materials, literary texts, and even field recordings and speech collected directly from speakers. Many of these sources, of course, may not be available online at all.
Of course, the internet makes some of this work much easier today. One useful resource is bydialects.org, which brings together almost all available dictionaries of Belarusian dialects. You can search words from different regions, including the Vitebsk area, and see where a particular word is used and what forms it takes.
Sometimes the real answer is not on the first page of search results at all, but in a book more than a century old or a manuscript that was never published. One of the key sources for studying the Vitebsk dialect is Mikalai Kaspiarovich’s “Vitebsk regional dictionary” (Віцебскі краёвы слоўнік), published in 1927. Its value is not purely historical. During his fieldwork, Uladzislau checked words from the dictionary against the way people in the region actually speak and found that much of the vocabulary recorded a hundred years ago is still used by older speakers today.
There is also a much more recent source: “Regional dictionary of the Vitebsk region: in two parts” (Рэгіянальны слоўнік Віцебшчыны: у 2 частках), compiled at Masherov Vitebsk State University. The first part was published in 2012 and the second in 2014. What makes this dictionary particularly valuable is that its vocabulary was collected during field expeditions, providing a record of the region’s contemporary dialects.
Taken together, the two dictionaries complement each other well: one captures how people spoke in the past, while the other shows what has survived and what was recorded more recently.
And the list goes on. Another important source Uladzislau points to is the two-volume “The language of the Syanno region: A dialect dictionary” (Мова Сенненшчыны: дыялектны слоўнік). The words it records are not dead, archaic, or merely historical – they are still part of living Belarusian dialect speech.
Another is Ryhor Baradulin’s “Ushachy word collection” (Вушацкі словазбор), a collection that can be both very funny and genuinely surprising. There are also more specialized studies by dialectologists, such as linguist Kryvitski’s “Some lexical regionalisms of the Vitebsk region” (З лексічных рэгіяналізмаў Віцебшчыны), published in 1976.
A particularly important source is Yazep Tsikhinski’s vast manuscript “Belarusian-Polish-russian dictionary” (Беларуска-польска-рускі слоўнік). It was there that Uladzislau once found the answer to the mystery of kilchyba, a word his grandmother used. Tsikhinski collected Belarusian vocabulary around the turn of the twentieth century, with the help of correspondents from different parts of Belarus. The dictionary itself, however, was never published. The manuscript is held in Vilnius, in the Manuscript Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.
It may sound surprising, but dictionaries from the Smolensk region can also be useful for studying eastern Belarusian dialects. Historically, the dialects of the Vitebsk and neighboring Smolensk regions were very close, and modern researchers also point to the strong influence of Belarusian in the area. Vladimir Dobrovolsky’s 1914 “Smolensk regional dictionary” (Смоленский областной словарь) contains many words closely related to those still used in eastern parts of the Vitebsk region. It is a useful place to look not only for regional vocabulary, but also for feminine forms, swear words, vulgar language, and other kinds of everyday speech that often never made it into official Belarusian dictionaries.
A more recent companion to this source is the “Dictionary of Smolensk dialects” (Словарь смоленских говоров), which has been published since 1974. It draws on more recent material while still building on Dobrovolsky’s work as one of its foundational sources.
That covers the scholarly side – dialectology and linguistics. But there is another, even more accessible source: literature. Vitebsk regionalisms can be found there too.
Yurka Vitsbich deliberately drew on the regional vocabulary of the Vitebsk area in his writing. During the soviet period, he was even criticized for his use of dialect words and archaisms. Many local words can also be found in works by Frants Siuko and Siarhiej Rubleuski, as well as in Alena Piatrovich’s book “The blue house: My history of Vitebsk” (Сіні дом. Мая гісторыя Віцебска). Texts like these show that regional speech is not just “the way grandmas and grandpas talk.” It can be a fully fledged literary tool and an integral part of a writer’s style.
Another source is contemporary fieldwork. Linguists and sociolinguists travel to different regions, record people speaking in local dialects, and collect words that have yet to make it into dictionaries. This material can remain in researchers’ private archives for years.
Among contemporary dialect researchers, Uladzislau mentions Vadzim Shkliaryk, author of “How Belarusians speak” (Як гавораць беларусы). His work explores regional variation in Belarusian and shows how pronunciation, vocabulary, and other linguistic features can sometimes reveal which part of the country a person comes from.
Manuscripts, correspondence, old newspapers, book drafts, and unpublished materials left by linguists and historians are a whole field of research in their own right. They are held in archives in Minsk, Vilnius, Warsaw, Riga, and other cities. Uladzislau does a great deal of his work in Vilnius, using materials from the pre-war Belarusian Museum. Today, the archive is held at the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.
And sometimes there is a significant difference between a manuscript and the book that eventually appeared in print. Editors might remove dialect forms, alter place names, standardize spelling, or cut feminine forms. As a result, today’s readers know only the edited version and may never realize that the authors originally wrote it differently. Archives therefore offer a window not only into literary history, but also into how the Belarusian language itself has changed over time.
This is particularly clear with feminine forms. You sometimes hear people say, “That word has never existed in Belarusian.” Then you open a dialect dictionary and there it is. Regional dictionaries preserve feminine forms that are missing from official standard dictionaries. And these are not necessarily new words – some have been in use for decades or even centuries. So before coining a word from scratch, it is worth checking whether Belarusian speakers got there first. You may find that the answer already exists. It may simply be hiding in an old dictionary, a book, or a manuscript. Or it may never have been recorded at all, surviving only in someone’s speech until somebody finally writes it down.
That is why hunting for words is about more than the chase. Sometimes the hardest part is knowing where the words are hiding.
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