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.

When the expert committee at the Ukrainian Society of the Deaf was working on de-Russifying the word “thank you” after the start of the full-scale war, there was the suggestion to leave it be, Tetiana ...