It used to be the case that to “win Eurovision you had to ‘fly on the wings of love’, ‘take me to your heaven’ or ‘sail into infinity’”, said The Guardian. But now other languages have got their musical acts together.
This year, a total of 24 languages will be sung at Eurovision as many entrants return to their native tongues.
‘Patronising Brits’
Competing nations were required to sing in their national language until 1999, but when this rule was abolished there was a “flood of entries” performed in English, said Aussievision. Delegations assumed that the “global language” would “win more appeal with audiences”.
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A study published in the Royal Society Open Science looked at the songs from every contest from 1956 until 2024, a total of 1,763 entries. It found that, from 1999, over 70% of songs were entirely in English or a mix of English and a native language. By 2014, more than three-quarters of entries were sung entirely in English, surging above 80% in the three years that followed.
But more recently there’s been a “return to songs performed in national languages”, a development that’s become “very popular with fans”. Some songs are performed in a mix of languages. For instance, this year’s entry from Moldova, “Viva, Moldova!”, performed by Satoshi, includes six languages. France, Italy, Portugal and Spain have “resisted the temptation” to use songs with English lyrics, said New Scientist.
Irving Wolther, a Eurovision historian, told The Guardian that “after Brexit, there was a sense of ‘now we are no longer being patronised by the Brits, we Europeans can express our own voice’”.
‘Smidge of German’
This year, the UK entry, called “Eins, Zwei, Drei”, includes “a smidge of German”, said Aussievision – the first time a language other than English has featured as part of a UK Eurovision song. The artist, Look Mum No Computer, told Radio Times that he’s “probably spent more time in Germany than any other country except for the UK, be it working on music, meeting people or playing shows”, so the German sections were “certainly inspired by spending a lot of time there”.
As he struggled to merge the verses and chorus, he searched for “a language I could count in that would make me feel better on a Eurovision stage” and using German “just made sense”.
Denmark’s Eurovision 2026 representative, Søren Torpegaard Lund, will perform his entry in Danish, despite an “intense public debate” about whether the song should be translated into English, said That Eurovision Site.
Erik Struve Hansen, the Eurovision producer in Denmark, said he was “extremely proud” that the song would be performed “exactly as it was written: in Danish”. Lund “writes and sings from the heart – and his feelings, dreams and stories live strongest in his own language”.