Russian Language Day at the UN was celebrated with an exhibition dedicated to Dahl’s Dictionary

6 June 2026 Culture and Education

This year, Language Day will be marked by the 225th anniversary of the birth of the outstanding Russian writer, ethnographer, and lexicographer Vladimir Dal, who, by the way, was a friend of Alexander Sergeyevich.

On the exhibition stand organized by the Russian Mission to the UN, – words from its “Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.” He worked on it for more than 50 years.

At the event dedicated to the opening of the exhibition, Deputy Head of the UN for General Assembly Affairs Movses Abelyan, who is also the Coordinator on Multilingualism Issues, noted that Dal himself modestly called himself a “student.”

Over the course of decades, he collected not only words but also figurative expressions, proverbs, and linguistic traditions from all over Russia, attempting to explain and describe the context in which they were formed. Thanks to this, Dal managed to preserve for future generations not only the language but also the cultural heritage.

“Such attention is not only paid to the words themselves, but also to the content of the discussion related to multilingualism activities within the United Nations,” emphasized Abelyan.

“This is a colossal work. Moreover, Dahl was not a linguist. For him, every new word found, heard, and recorded was, essentially, a discovery,” said Elvira Geydarova, head of the Department of Russian Linguistics at Baku State University, in an interview with the UN news service.

The significance of Dahl’s dictionary is difficult to overestimate, she explained: in the first half of the 19th century, a relatively historical-comparative method of studying languages prevailed, all efforts were aimed at the restoration of ancient linguistic forms.

“The contemporary state of the language, the living dialects, have been practically unstudied. Therefore, Dahl’s explanatory dictionary became a precursor for the emergence of dialectological dictionaries and research in this field,” said Geydarov.