Eurovision 2018: The languages of the 43 entries
Today we will know which country will be this year’s Eurovision winner here in Lisbon. As it is known, since 1999, the language of choice is free for all countries (which was previously the case between 1973 and 1976). Since the adoption of this regulation, the majority of the songs have been interpreted in English.
Last year in Kiev, besides English, we heard six other languages in the 43 songs that competed. Portuguese, Hungarian and Belarusian (for the first time) but also Spanish, French and Italian along with English.
This year things have changed remarkably especially after Salvador’s victory but also because the countries that used their mother tongue last year were all in the final.
Portugal was the second country to win exclusively with singing in its own language after 2007 where Serbia was the only winner singing in Serbian.
This year, out of a total of 43 songs, 12 countries in total sang in their mother tongue, except English (UK, Ireland, Australia). These were: Albania, Armenia, Serbia, Hungary, Montenegro, Slovenia, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and, of course, Greece.
Characteristically, Georgia used the Georgian language for the first time. Also, Estonia interprets its song in Italian, Denmark uses, in addition to English and Icelandic, and Lithuania interprets the last chorus in Lithuanian.
As for the 26 songs that we will see tomorrow night in the final, nine of them will not use English.
Countries that are participating this year, but we have heard their national language for several years are: Danish (1997), Swedish (1998), Maltese (2000), Latvian (2004), Ukrainian (2005) 2007).
Languages that have been heard more recently but have not been heard in recent years are: Norwegian, Hebrew, Croatian, Finnish, Russian, Polish, Dutch, and Skopje. Also, we have heard Czech (2007) and Belarusian (2017) in the contest once but we have not yet heard the national language of Azerbaijan .
