The World Cup is an international affair — a melting pot of nationalities and languages coming together over a shared love of sports (and competition).
It also happens to coincide with Pride Month, a commemoration of the June 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City that launched the modern-day LGBTQ Pride movement.
Honoring diversity in all of its forms is part of our cultural DNA, and we wanted to find a way to acknowledge the potential of an event like the games in Russia, even when it’s taking place in a country that’s notorious for its anti-gay legislation. Russia is among the most dangerous places for LGBTQ travelers to visit, and many queer sports fans around the world were warned to avoid public displays that might “out” them in any way.
Babbel is a language company, and language is at the root of what we bring to the table. We believe language should reflect the lived realities of the people who use it, and we believe in the transformative potential of language to evolve over time.
In anticipation of the 2018 games, we came up with a special Russian crash course intended specifically for soccer fans traveling to Russia.
We also came up with the campaign above, which depicts two same-sex couples and a reimagination of the phrase “I’m married,” which carries the implicit assumption of heterosexuality in Russian.
In colloquial Russian, there are two different ways to say “I am married.” A heterosexual woman would say: Я замужем. This literally translates to “I am behind the husband.” We transposed this sentence onto the poster with two men, thus inverting the traditional linguistic and social use of the expression.
Grammatically speaking, the phrase Я женат (literally meaning “I am wifed”) can be used only by men. We added the -a ending, which is consistent with the female form of nouns, names, and surnames in the Russian language. Я жената doesn’t formally exist in the Russian language — yet. But we raise our cup to the possibility.
