In this week’s Newsletter we focus on a mega weekend of Eurovision news with songs selected from Denmark, Switzerland and Austria, as well as heaps of National Final qualifiers to get through. One of those songs, ‘Loin d’ici’ representing Austria, caught the attention of Newsletter Editor Ben Robertson this week for its use of the French language. With France stuck in a Eurovision rut, what is Zoe thinking of?
The French language has an identity problem within the Eurovision Song Contest. Demoted from its heady days of an equal, or even superior to English, as it was in the birth of the Song Contest, now French is arguably behind many others in the pecking order. More school students are picking up Spanish at school, Germany is the economic centre of the continent again and in terms of first language speakers it’s the Russian language that is number one across our Contest. All these factors mean that presenters rarely have conversational French (Petra Mede, the obvious exception, is played up for her French fluency to the point of parody that somebody would actually still speak the language) and it becomes jarring when France or Belgium read out their Eurovision points in their own language.
Read more of Ben’s thoughts on this and all the Eurovision news by clicking through this link. Keep checking the newsletter each week through to May!