Belarusan and Soviet flags on parade, during a protest against the so-called “parasites’ tax” in Minsk, March 2017. Photo (c): Anton Matoĺka. Used with permission. My last article “three naïve questions about Belarus” has prompted many questions. First and foremost, they concern the language we use in Belarus to talk about our national identity. The situation is unique, to put it briefly. In the worst possible sense of the word. Belarus, the 13th largest country in Europe, is formally bilingual. But in practice things are different: this is not a bilingualism where one can simply indicate your preferred language of communication and speak it to a state official as you please. No, in common practice, officials interpret bilingualism not as an obligation to respond in either state language (Belarusan or Russian), but as their freedom to respond in either of the two. Fortunately, at least in the case of written appeals, there is a legal requirement to respond in the language used by the sender. This is not the kind of bilingualism where people can freely choose what language they want their children to be educated in. In fact, if Belarusan-speaking parents want their children to have classes or study groups conducted in our national language, they often have to send them to schools in remote regions. Nobody compensates them for transportation costs. Their requirements simply cannot be fulfilled in schools closer to where they live. And this state of affairs is still called “bilingualism.” It is a bilingualism thanks to which Belarus has become the most Russified country of all those which were once under Soviet rule. With that in mind, let's consider the results of the many “decolonising” projects carried out in Belarus between 2010 and 2019. The well-known civic campaign “Budzma Belarusami!” (“Let's be Belarusans!”) began at the start of the decade. After the mass protests of the 2000s, the authorities decided on a “final solution to the opposition issue” and dispersed protesters with brutal force in 2010. Subsequent searches of activists’ homes and detentions forced many into a long depression. It was fertile soil for a campaign to strengthen national identity. In a sense, the move was cognitive psychotherapy on a national scale: lead Belarusan society by the hand to the mirror, show it the beauty of its culture and say that Belarusan denotes success, stylishness. It's was a shock to colonial culture, where for decades everything original, everything indigenous, was dismissed as second-rate. During this period, Budzma helped launch the Ad.nak! festival, which gave a boost to the growing fashion of using the Belarusan language in advertising. Large businesses started to regard their native language as an effective tool for communication once more. At the start of the millennium, that had seemed unimaginable, and of no use to anybody. Animation for the “Budzma Belarusami” song, one of the most viral of all the campaigns mentioned in this article. An entire article could be written solely about the presence of the Belarusan language in business. In brief, the trend is towards the merging of medium- and small-sized businesses, which support Belarusan language and culture, while large business sometimes operate quite prominently in Belarusan. For example, the A-100 chain of petrol stations announced their transition to the Belarusan language. One company even produced cornflower-flavoured ice cream (the cornflower is a popular national symbol of Belarus), while the country's largest mobile operator made cultural development part of its company policy and supported, for example, the youth activist Andrej Kim's initiative to show films dubbed in Belarusan. The latter is particularly important given that despite the packed halls of the country's 60 or so cinemas, all state film distribution is still carried out in Russian. Thanks to a systematic media campaign to “get culture out from between the weather forecast and sports and onto the front pages,” Budzma created the prototype of one of the most prominent domestic brands of the last decade: t-shirts bearing traditional Belarusan motifs. The campaign was unable to ensure their mass production, but nature abhors a vacuum, and by the middle of the decade Paval Bielavus, organiser of the events, developed Budzma's idea further and created the “vyshymayka,” a factory-produced product bearing folk art patterns. Together with Bielavus's online shop symbal.by, several small businesses with a slant towards Belarusan culture became visible in the market. Some of their products were at least, if not more aesthetically striking than Symbal's t-shirts. A good example was the urban brand LSTR. Belarusans wearing Vyshymayki. Image from budzma.by and symbal.by.