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General
Belarusian（白俄罗斯语 ）:is the language of the new nation of Belarus, which borders Poland and whose capital is Minsk. Though similar to Russian—so much so that some consider it merely a dialect of Russian—it has been given official status in the country, and thus documents, books, and periodicals are published in it. There are about 7 million speakers. The alphabet contains the non-Russian letters i and y.
Actual native speakers of Russian say that they don't understand Belarusian when they hear it spoken and they are not able to read it at all. There are some similar end even identical words in the both languages, but beyond this, the languages are quite different. (From: http://www.worldlanguage.com/ )

Following information is from: http://www.belarus-misc.org/bel-ling.htm
Belarusian is an Indo-European language, one of the East Slavic languages, along with Russian and Ukrainian. For historical reasons, it can be written with either the Cyrillic (kirylicaj) or accented Latin (Latsinka) alphabets.
Communities of the East Slavic linguistic family interacted with one another as well as with speakers of other languages, Slavic and non-Slavic. Changes in the political and spiritual organizations and structures that occurred in this area had great effects over time as well.
Since Belarusian religious literature shared its origins with Russian and Ukrainian in the 11th through 14th centuries (when the common language was what is often called Church Slavonic), Belarusian literature, and thus the written language, only came into its own in the 15th century.
A common ancestor for both literary Ukrainian and Belarusian, is the language called Ruthenian. For further discussion refer to the book, Testament to Ruthenian: A Linguistic Analysis of the Smotryc'kyj Variant, and the discussion of "The Grand Duchy of Litva, Rus', and Samogitia (GDL)", including the map depicting the Polish Commonwealth and the Grand Duchy of Litva, Samogitia, and Rus' around approximately 1620.
Refer to the following map for the geographical range of spoken Belarusian at the beginning of the nineteenth century. (Note: The file size of the map is a 223 KB.)

External Links:
Vasil Bykau
http://www.belarus-misc.org/bel-ling.htm
http://www.pravapis.org/
http://astore.amazon.co.uk/lingualove-21?_encoding=UTF8&node=16
Belarusian online dictionaries http://www.language-resource.co.uk/dictionaries.html?m=c&c=11