The BA program in Russian trains students in both written and spoken Russian and in Russian civilization, culture, and literature.

Russian is the 10th most widely spoken language (of 322 overall) in the United States. One in every 372 Americans over age 5 uses Russian in the home.

Russian is currently the fifth most widely used language in the world, reportedly spoken by 278 million people. With 164 million native speakers, it is the largest native language in Europe. Russian is one of six official languages of the United Nations, (along with Arabic, Chinese, English, French, and Spanish), and the Cyrillic alphabet is now one of three official alphabets of the United Nations. One-fourth of the scientific literature published worldwide is published in Russian.