Sometime ago I was asking what happened to the Swedish songwriters in Eurovision (here) and now it's time to ask whatever happened to the English language? Namely, since the language rule was dropped in 1999 this year we have fewer songs in English than ever! Mind you, I think these two things are extremely positive things; both the lack of English and the Swedish songwriters!
In 2013 we have 39 songs in the competition and 22 are to be sung in English (or 56%) and 17 in other local languages, and for the first time none in a mix of English and something else. That was close already back in 2010 when there were only two bilingual songs including English (Poland and Bulgaria) and neither of them made the final. On the other end of the statistics is 2007 when 13 of the 42 songs were with mixed English and 22 in English alone bringing it up to 83%. But that's not the worst of it. In 2001 that was 87% when only Israel, Portugal and Spain fully believed in their own local languages....
The amount of the English language in the competition has been going up and down since 1999 so maybe we can't call it a trend yet even if 2013 hits the lowest ever. Also 2008 was a good year for non-English songs (65%) but in 2009 it jumped back to 76%...
In all 55 languages have been presented over the years in Eurovision, 17 of them for the first time since 1999 including Swahili, Tahiti, Udmurt, Catalan and ...ehm, consctructed langauge, but unfortunalely only one has won since 1999, namely Serbian in 2007. English-Ugrainian mix made it in 2004 but all the other have been entirely in English.... thant's 10%... Will we have another one this year?
(Ed.note: Malta, United Kingdom and Ireland singing in their native English is ignored in these calculation on purpose, as they don't really even question to sing in any other language, even if they could like the rest of us If they were counted the percentage of countries singing in "native language" rather than English would be higher, and the number of singing in English lower, but the annual differences between years would be the same in general.)
(Ed.note: Malta, United Kingdom and Ireland singing in their native English is ignored in these calculation on purpose, as they don't really even question to sing in any other language, even if they could like the rest of us If they were counted the percentage of countries singing in "native language" rather than English would be higher, and the number of singing in English lower, but the annual differences between years would be the same in general.)
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