Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home.

During my sophomore year of college in 2010, I picked my major: Russian. I had been studying the language and was excited for the opportunity to read literature, learn about another part of the world ...

June 6 was declared International Russian language day by the United Nations in 2010 to coincide with the birthday of Aleksandr Pushkin, considered the father of modern Russian literature. In terms of ...

When anthropology researcher Ashley McDermott was doing fieldwork in Kyrgyzstan a few years ago, she says many people voiced the same concern: Children were losing touch with their indigenous language ...

I worried about his ability to fit in. But then he fell in love with Russian — and on a trip to Central Asia, he flourished. The writer Paul Tough and his son Max.Credit...Gueorgui Pinkhassov for The ...