Ursäkta mig och tack for extra information.

Dear ◊Impersonator◊, thank you for your suggestion.

I strongly disapprove it.

ON ARTEFACTS AND GENERAL MATTERS

◊Impersonator◊'s arguments as well as their elaborations are political and not linguistic. Tatoeba is a project around languages so any arguments other than linguistic are to be disregarded **by definition**. Tatoeba is not a place to expose one's political convictions nor the conclusions made thereof while this is what ◊Impersonator◊ exposes in his comment.

Let it be known that ◊Impersonator◊'s suggestion comes exactly at the time of large, instrumentalized political actions on the territories where Belarusan language is used (August 2020), let it also be noted that the white-red-white flag ◊Impersonator◊ is referring to acts as one of the totems of such instrumentalization. At Tatoeba, our purpose is to produce equilibrated, neutral decisions. Any decision using a politically-engaged token induces cognitive abberations and should be postponed until this token ceases to be such. I think it is only possible to mention the white-red-white flag when this totem becomes back just a flag and when we are able to make a cold-minded, weighted decision.


ON THE ARGUMENTS

1. "Recently, the white-red-white flag has been adopted by most Belarusians".

This is false.

Just as Wikipedia does, Tatoeba tries to reflect the existing situation and not to create new habits (in Wikipedia terms: no original research).

While the whole issue of associating languages with flags of countries is a tricky and bad idea (let's invent e.g. a politically neutral French language flag), it is a feasible matter if there exists one-to-one language-to-country correspondence. That is the case of the Belarusan language, whose major part of speakers inhabits Belarus, where as well it is an official language. ◊Impersonator◊ makes an error referring to some "recent" facts. The majority of Belarusans have adopted their flag in 1995 (= a quarter-century ago) and it had been officialized and legitimized immediately and widely used since. Not only postulated, that flag is factually used, e.g. in Belarusan passports (even held by those who disapprove the authority delivering those passports), e.g. in car number plates (even held by those who disapprove the authority delivering those plates) and all other sorts of documents, symbols and protocols. This symbol, just as the national anthem and the national coat of arms, is supposed to be treated with respect, and there are penal liability consequences for their abuse, according to the country's Criminal Code, just as in any other country.

◊Impersonator◊, The Tatoeba community including myself may misknow some facts, so please provide us with some further references to remind us of Belarusans adopting — in somehow juridically significant manner — the white-red-white flag. So far I cannot find any mention of such choice.

◊Impersonator◊, please use verifiable and quantifiable categories. "It became the flag of the majority" — one cannot verify this statement and it's not Tatoeba's contributors' responsibility to decode those external signals. As long as international organizations provide us with standardized versions of countries', languages' names, flags, capitals etc., we do not need to invent them ourselves.

2. I think ◊Impersonator◊ misunderstood the terms "varieties" or "variants" as mentioned by Tatoeba guidelines.

(My role as a professional linguist is also to disseminate knowledge, so please bear with me mumbling a little bit.)

Every language shows some level of diversity in its lexical units, phonology and phonotactics. It does not automatically make any two different speech instances different language "varieties". When one speaks of **variants** or **varieties**, the most evident feature is grammatical discrepancies. Usually this automatically leads to mutual incomprehensibility. This is e.g. the case of Western and Eastern Armenian. This is the case of different Italian dialects (Napoletano, Ligurian etc.) Usually, the ISO classification attributes a separate code to each of them. I have been dealing with updating ISO tables in the past, and you should know that to state some parlance as a "variety", one needs to provide documental evidences (publications) that 1) it exists (say, that the mentioned village really speaks the stated idiom) 2) that this "variety" is sufficiently distinct from its superstrate (that, say, Napoletan is morphologically distinct from Italian and from, say, Ligurian) and cannot be reduced to a dialect. On the other hand, sometimes mutual comprehensibility exposes artificial language segregation: Romanian and Moldovan, Iranian Persian (Farsi), Afghani Persian (Dari) and Tajiki Persian, Indonesian and Malay etc.

To say that "classical" and "official" Belarusan languages are "varieties" would be to state that they have different number of cases, differently distribute genders across nouns, use different cases and prepositions with the same verbs and expose different conjugation schemes and different phi- and theta- licencing (sorry, these are syntacticians' hardcore, but I must mention them). THIS IS NOT THE CASE! Not only don't these two "varieties" differ in any of the abovementioned features, they do not differ in pronounciation. As is well known, the primary form of any language is the linearized phonematic (=abstract phonetic) form. It is conditioned by the abstract knowledge of the language and is not related to using some specific script or to using a script at all (=being literate). That's the form of the language recorded by professional linguists in dialectology expeditions. When a Belarusan-speaking person pronounces the sequence of phonemes /k z'oram ahnʲ'istɨm k prɨv'ol̃ʲu nʲabʲ'ɛsnamu/ (‘to the stars of fire, to the expanses of the sky’, a Yanka Kupala's poem), it is completely devoid of any markedness as "classical" or "official" and is completely understood by any speaker of Belarusan, and this phonematic sequence is the primary form of Belarusian speech. Now in writing one can depict this phrase (or any other just as well) using differents strategies of indicating secondary articulation of palatalization (Roman languages palatalize only /l,n/, Slavic ones are known to palatalize everything and there had been three distinct historical palatalization shifts in XI, XII and XIII cc.). The "sequential strategy of indicating palatalization in writing" is simply called "classical orthography", the "combining strategy of indicating palatalization in writing" is simply called "official orthography" and it is the only official one. The sequential strategies using Latin or Arabic letters are known as "Belarusan Latin orthography" and "Belarusan Arabic script". There are two-side conversion procedures between any pair of the latter. The abovementioned phrase would be written as follows using those graphical protocols: "К зорам агністым, к прыволлю нябеснаму", classical "К зорам агністым, к прывольлю нябеснаму", Belarusan Latin "K zoram ahnistym, k pryvoĺliu niabiesnamu", Belarusan Arabic "ک زوَرام اهنِیستىم، ک پرىووَلِّو نِابِاِسنامو". Those are pronounced identically because they are one single utterance. None of those protocols is a "language variety" in a linguistic sense, and any portion of Belarusan speech can be written within any of those conventions (nor are those "transliterations", but this would make us deviate too far away). As have mentioned the topic-starter, some people condition politically their choice between official and "classical" orthographies. The scripts themselves are neutral, the political spicing up is the people's.

To sum up: what the topicstarter has mentioned are not linguistic "varieties" of the Belarusan language and it is normal that there is no ISO code attributed to them. The ISO code is correctly attributed to the unitary and undivided Belarusan language.

https://wals.info/languoid/lect/wals_code_blr

I think, we can consider as its varieties: "Trasianka" — a saturation of the Belarusian phonetics by the Russian lexical flows. "Polessian" — a microlanguage related to Belarusan and sharing several features with Ukrainian (or related to Ukrainian and sharing several features with Belarusian?), "Old-Belarusan" aka "Old-Ukraininan" aka "Ruthenian". Those languages either have separate ISO codes, or those codes can be assigned in principle after a probing procedure with ISO authorities ("Trasianka" would need more proper corpus). So far, on Tatoeba, we would distinguish them with tags, just as we would do with the dialectal forms (e.g. specific northern dialects of Belarusan mixing up /ч/ and /ц/).

So there are no two varieties to be represented by two different flags.

ANOTHER RELATED ISSUES

These matters do not directly relate to the topic, but may clarify the situation because ◊Impersonator◊ has provided some false arguments in the comments. Especially for the people who do not live in or have never been to Belarus, his way of presenting the facts is at least misleading.

◊Impersonator◊ mentions that Belarusan language has been left disregarded during the last twenty years and that the main source of this evil are official authorities.

This is false.

1) Let it be known that these are the very years when complete codification of the Belarusan language has been accomplished.

The Belarusan Language Institute of the National Academy of Sciences has alone published several central codification works:
- Rules of Belarusan Orthography (2008).
- Full Orthoepic Dictionary compliant with these Rules
- Grammar dictionaries of nous; verbs; adjectives; etc. compliant with these Rules (four or five autonomous dictionaries)
- Historical Dictionary of the Belarusian language (an ongoing publication, 21 volumes covering А—О so far, since 1982)
- Etymological dictionary of the Belarusian language (an ongoing publication, 14 volumes covering А—Т so far, since 1978).

The two last academic items are fundamental research and represent titanic amount of time and effort.


Please find the thousand-full list at their website http://www.iml.basnet.by/publikacyi . One cat find other, smaller and regional state-funded publishers publishing thousands of books and magazines in or about Belarusan language. They are plenty.

Some preparatory codification work concerning the Latin script has also been done. In 2008, an official Belarusian Latin scripting procedure has been introduced. It has been adopted into international use and standardized by UN and UNESCO afterwards.

2) Numerous and quite popular Belarusian-language literary series are being published by the state publishers Mastackaja Litaratura and Bielaruś as well as topic-centered magazines like Nastaŭnickaja hazieta, Źviazda, Rodnaje Slova, Litaratura i Mastactva, (please find the abundant continuation yourself). Those are accessible in libraries in every village. The topic-centered spontaneous publications (not making part of any series) of those state publishers are usually initiated and funded by the Ministry of Communication (e.g. the recent edition of the Carmen Bisontis—Pieśnia pra Zubra).

3) Even the state television channels Belarus 1 (General), Belarus 2 (Films), Belarus 3 (Culture), Belarus 4 (Regional News), Belarus 5 (Sports) broadcast in Belarusan. The channel Belarus 5 (Sports) even comments sport events in Belarusian **on live air**. This fact completely tramples down ◊Impersonator◊'s misobservation that the official authorities are the main source of debelarusization in the country. Local press is often published in Belarusan. In my town (Bialyničy), the regional newspaper is published in Belarusan (cf. Zara nad Drućciu: zara.by )

4) Local and nationwide literary reviews, competitions and readings are held in Belarusan and concentrate publics of different ages. In my town (Bialyničy) alone, we are going to celebrate the National Writer's Day (Dzień bielaruskaha piśmienstva) in three weeks, celebrated every year since 1994 every time in different city/town. It is held in Belarusan language and will include the awarding of the National Literary Prize, as well as other accompanying artefacts (publishing poetry collection of the laureats and participants etc.). Such initiatives are usually state-funded, and they popularize Belarusian language on both national and international levels. You can imagine the whole volume of such type of events on the country scale.

5) Exploring internal richness of the Belarusian language, hundreds of dialectological and ethnographic trips are organized by Belarusian State University, Academy of Sciences and Belarusian TV (BielTelieRadyjoKampanija), not to mentions other regional projects. Those expeditions are usually state-funded and their purposes are usually to gather 1) dialectally rich speech samples 2) regional ethnographic content (songs, tales, legends). Two next links give examples.

- Vadzim Škliaryk from Academy of Sciences about their ethnographic trip into Palieśsie (with sound samples) https://philology.by/u-hlyb-paliessia

- Aksana Viečar from Belarusian TV : "Napierad u minulaje" (‘fast-forward into the past’) about gathering folk songs (Belarus 3 any Sunday around 10AM, so far >500 villages and songs) and "Nacyjanaĺny chit-parad" (Belarus 3 any Sunday around 11AM) about popularizing these very songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhmAGshgGSI (final song at 22:42)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-KQvNX5zps


6) Belarusian National Library (https://nlb.by/upload/iblock/02a/biblioteka.jpg and http://moscowalk.ru/images/2013...ka/minsk19.jpg ) ­— a modern storage for Belarusan content on physical support. It has been built within the latest 26 years and by official authorities. Its role is to store Belarusan physical and digital documents, repair and restore damaged documents, acquire Belarusan manuscripts all over the world and organize scientific and educational exchanges and round tables. Among others, it contains unpublished manuscripts of Belarusan poets, yet to be deciphered, Skorina's (proto)-Belarusan (=proto-Ukraininan = Ruthenian) books of 1522 and ancient Belarusan Arabic manuscripts (XIV c).

Conclusion: not only private and marginal initiatives, but also (and first of all) state-funded television, press, research centers, publishers and events favor and promote Belarusan language. Your intention, ◊Impersonator◊, to dissociate the Belarusan language from its country (along with its flag) is regrettable, it owes a lot to this land.

Personally, ◊Impersonator◊, I think, you are trying to create a precedent out of a non-event.