Eurovision’s Many Languages – But Can They Even Win?

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A World Of Languages

When it comes to Eurovision, there are roughly 40 countries competing these days, in many ways you want to stand out from the crowd. How exactly should you go about doing that though? One solution is to bring a song in a language spoken by one of the communities within your country that puts you on the map. Another answer is to have your song in a language that isn’t necessarily strongly linked to your country but may have a connection to the artist or appeal strongly to a particular demographic. We live in an interlinked global world with many different languages, each with their own unique sounds the possibilities are endless. Is this the best way to stand out in the contest though? The more obscure languages may well stand out but equally they may alienate voters who no longer may grasp the meaning behind the song.

No More Language Restrictions

This trade-off between uniqueness and comprehension was really put to the test when the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) decided to remove all language restrictions at the contest. Would the number of languages diversify or reduce? Ultimately, a bit of both happened. English, the de facto lingua franca was naturally utilised on mass by most countries. Equally though many countries experimented more with their language choices and utilised the opportunity to send songs from other regions of the world. Countries who’s languages were not widely spoken across Europe found themselves suddenly able to pick multiple European languages and cram them into one song. The long-term experiment as to what strategy would be most successful had begun.

What Languages Have Been At Eurovision?

Several. Rather than give a long and boring list, it is easier to simply watch the 2015 semi-final opening act and then add in the missing languages!

We can now also include: Amharic*, Belarussian, Japanese and Sranan Tongo to the list (phew)

*Amharic would have participated in Eurovision 2020 had the contest not been cancelled.

Success By Comprehension?

It’s one thing to have had many languages enter the contest since the language rule was scrapped but are any of the smaller languages successful? Well, English by far has the most number of winners these days, closely followed by French (a major language in many of the founding countries) but do lesser spoken languages ever win?

Languages By Speakers

A very rough (with many estimates and potentially unreliable sources) graph of the number of speakers for every Eurovision language can be plotted. Songs with a winning entry at least partially in their languages are highlighted in gold/yellow in the graph below. Please note that imaginary/constructed languages have appeared at Eurovision (hence why they are on the graph) though as they have no speakers have no bar. There is not a winning song in an imaginary language so they would be coloured blue. Other points of note are that the graph is on a logarithmic scale and that languages are constantly changing, so defining every distinct language at Eurovision and its number of global speakers is next to impossible.

Why Include The Graph At All?

Whilst the data in the graph is not the most accurate nor will it be up-to-date for long, it does show a distinct skew to more widely spoken languages winning the contest. The languages with the least amount of global speakers to have won the contest sit on around five million speakers. It is worth noting though that when runners up are also considered, Udmurt and the Imaginary/Constructed languages join this list.

Any Conclusions?

Clearly being understood is useful but it isn’t the be all and end all. The number of languages to have participated at Eurovision is remarkably still growing and the capacity of a language to express a culture or sentiment is not to be understated. Ultimately, I believe there is a trade-off at play between finding a language to convey meaning, sentiment or aspects of a culture to Eurovision and it will be exciting to see how many more languages are sent our way in future!

The List Of languages

For those partially sighted or who do not want to squint at the graph/listen to the song the full list of languages is:

  1. English
  2. Spanish
  3. Arabic
  4. French
  5. Portuguese
  6. Russian
  7. German
  8. Japanese
  9. Turkish
  10. Swahili
  11. Italian
  12. Amharic
  13. Polish
  14. Ukrainian
  15. Azeri
  16. Dutch
  17. Romanian
  18. Czech
  19. Greek
  20. Hungarian
  21. Swedish
  22. Belarussian
  23. Sign Language
  24. Serbian
  25. Vorarlbergish
  26. Catalan
  27. Hebrew
  28. Bulgarian
  29. Haitan Creole
  30. Armenian
  31. Croatian
  32. Slovak
  33. Albanian
  34. Danish
  35. Finnish
  36. Romani
  37. Neapolitan
  38. Crimean Tartar
  39. Norwegian
  40. Bosnian
  41. Georgian
  42. Viennese
  43. Lithuanian
  44. Slovene
  45. Macedonian
  46. Latvian
  47. Antilliean Creole
  48. Irish
  49. Estonian
  50. Pontic
  51. Sranan Tongo
  52. Maltese
  53. Samogitian
  54. Corsican
  55. Luxembourgish
  56. Udmurt
  57. Icelandic
  58. Montenegrin
  59. Breton
  60. Voro
  61. Tahitian
  62. Romansh
  63. Ancient Greek
  64. Imaginary/Constructed

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