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Frenchless Eurovision

Who would have thought we come to this? In this year's Eurovision not a single song is sung in French (except a few words in Lithuanian song, sigh). Even France itself has skipped French and sings in Corsican (for the second time actually) as they didn't want to sing in Italian as the song was originally written in. But then Italy on the other hand sings in mixed English-Italian and San Marino only in English. Norway brings Swahili to the contest with a song that is as Norwegian as is Swahili. What happened to the national flavour - the original idea of Eurovision? We have 36 entries in English or mixed English with Bosnian, Greek, Hungarian, Albanian or such. Only Serbia, Poland, Portugal, FYR Macedonia, Cyprus, Spain and Bulgaria stick to their national language - while writing this. I wouldn't be surprised if in a few hours we hear Poland, FYR Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia have changed to English!
On the other hand we have to back to 1988 to find the last winner in French, Céline Dion's Ne partez pas sans moi and France itself has won the last time in 1977 with fabulous L'oiseau et l'enfant by Maria Miriam. The 2000's is sad reading: only Serbia has managed to win with a non-English song when Marija Serifovic triumphed in Helsinki with Molitva. And think that French winning score was in the 50's 50%, 60's 38%, 70's 40% and still in the 80's 30%...  Maybe we need Monaco and Luxembourg back? Or at least France sticking to its own language?

UPDATE: It looks like at leasrt Poland has changed the language and Jestem turns into First class ticket to heaven....
UPDATE 2: They have changed it back to Jestem in eurovision.tv so it seems she will sing in Polish after all, great!

Comments

Kalevi said…
It is too bad that there is no French in this year's contest--however, I actually like what France has done, since it is a language of France that they have chosen, and there is a long tradition of opera in France, so the entry still really strikes me as French (and my God, I think it's really good). I wonder if things will be more normal next year?

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