Eurovision Rants

Languages in Eurovision

(Alright, this.... escalated quickly.
Almost at 50 reads wow, thank you all so much! Not bad for a first book relating a lot of random stuff about Eurovision as a whole, but I'm still grateful for noticing its existence ^^

So, this chapter will mainly focus on languages in Eurovision Song Contest. For my fellow foreign language fans, this might interest you, as we'll cover mainly the ones which rarely appeared on the stage.)
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When it comes to Eurovision, probably the first thing you'd point out is that some nations sing in their native tongue. As covered before about the Retro Eurovision side, there was this rule which went on-off throughout the years untill 1998.

The national language rule.

You see, this "restriction" rule kind-of dominated Eurovision in the Retro Eurovision, lasting almost 27 years and having small breaks here and there. After 1998, the rule was taken off and so the countries were allowed to sing in whatever language they wanted.

If you go under this retrospective, you're probably thinking that, in over 60 years of existence, all countries must have sung at least once in their native tongue. Right?

....Well, not really. We'll cover soon the exception from the rule. It used to be 2 countries which never sang in their native tongue, however one of them went out after their 2017 entry.

But first - let's cover a few of some other dialects or other languages which have had the rare opportunity to be heard in Eurovision Song Contest, aside the ones which are technically participating.

About the dialects, depends on which side you'd go for: some dialects can be understood by the general population but with slight diferences in pronunciation/slight word changes or which are completely different aside the predominant language.

With that cleared, let's begin with some of them.

Udmurt

The grannies making cookies during the Russian performance in 2012, aside the English chorus, the verses weren't technically the Russian language generally spoken.

The Udmurt language is mainly a Finno-Ugric language, mainly spoken in the Udmurtia region of Russia, and which co-exists with the Russian language. It doesn't really have so many speakers (according to Wikipedia, apparently there's around 340.000 native speakers after the last census, it could be more though, not sure).

Buranovskiye Babushki were at their second attempt when they won the Russian national selection back in 2012. There were 8 grannies which formed the group, however there's an Eurovision rule which restricts the number of people to 6, so unfortunately, 2 grannies had to stay behind.

Despite that, the grannies ended up 2nd overall, defeated only by Sweden in that year. Yay, grannies! Also, yay cookies!

Irish