By Ivan Raykoff
Three decades ago—after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the democratic and capitalist revolutions in Eastern Europe, the reunification of Germany, and the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia—the eastward expansion of the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) heralded a new period of security and stability across Europe. These changes also instigated many future conflicts, most significantly Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its ongoing invasion of Ukraine. From The Troubles in Northern Ireland to the Syrian refugee crisis, from the marriage of the Euro to the Brexit divorce, debates over the boundaries and the fundamental values of “Europe” continue to challenge individuals, nations, the EU, and NATO.
Yet throughout the Cold War and decades of sweeping sociopolitical changes, one uniquely European institution presents an annual musical showcase that deliberately and self-consciously performs ideals of cultural exchange, creative collaboration, and peaceful coexistence: the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC). One distinctive feature of this contest over its 70-year history is its multiplicity of languages and musical styles. Examining songs across languages and drawing on Julia Kristeva’s idea that “the foreigner lives within us,” this article suggests that the ESC invites audiences to recognize the strangeness of foreign cultures while discovering shared connection across difference.
Musical Arena of Nations
Since its founding in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has now become the largest and longest-running international live televised music event in the world. The show is almost as old as the postwar order, and its reach is now far broader than the continent itself. It gathers hundreds of millions of viewers globally on television and streaming channels, plus even more online and across its social media platforms.[1] This year, 35 countries will compete in Vienna, Austria, in the second week of May, since Austria won last year’s contest held in Switzerland. Each participating country presents an original three-minute song in any language and musical style, and viewers (watching online at home, at parties or public screenings, or in the host city arena) can vote for any song except the one representing their own country. This public vote comprises half of the final score, the other half being constituted by the votes of national juries made up of music and media professionals. Each country’s national broadcaster (the BBC in the United Kingdom, or RAI in Italy, for example) decides who will compete in the contest, often through a national selection process, and the European Broadcasting Union manages the contest. The contest is held on three days during the same week, with two semi-finals narrowing down the total number of contestants to 25 for the Grand Final.
Like the Olympic Games, Eurovision dramatizes the ancient and powerful ethos of cooperation through competition, a modern-day agōn (gathering, conflict, or contest) that represents deeply held emotions, beliefs, and ideals.[2] It is a very public platform for expressing European national identities and shared imaginaries, thus it reflects geopolitical ties and rivalries as it serves as an exercise in soft diplomatic power for participating nations. Its values of diversity and inclusivity are especially meaningful at a time when geopolitical conflict challenges Europe’s postwar order and rising ethnocentric nationalism embraces a more homogenous identity. Its ability to forecast European political and economic integration was always a bit uncanny, though the myth that it was designed to unify postwar Europe with songs has been mostly debunked (and NATO did not invent it either).[3] Nevertheless, this contest does create a powerful “affect network” of fans and followers seeking shared connection and community through its cosmopolitan musicking ritual.
A Musical Tower of Babel
With nearly 1,800 songs in over 50 languages and a wide range of musical styles, Eurovision is the world’s most musically and linguistically diverse song repertoire—or in less flattering terms, a pop music Tower of Babel. The following examples explore a polyglot tour of songs in eight Eurovision languages: English, Estonian, Finnish, German, Hungarian, Italian, Swedish, and “imaginary.” With so many languages and musical traditions present at Eurovision, it is likely that listeners will not understand what some songs are trying to convey. To paraphrase the foreign tourist’s most frequent question, “Do you speak Eurovision?”
This diversity of languages is partly a result of the contest’s earlier rules. Entries were supposed to be sung in the national language of the presenting country, but this stipulation was dropped in 1973 to allow for more artistic freedom. It was reinstated in 1977 because too many songs were being sung in English, leading to concerns that the contest was losing its cultural distinctiveness. The rule was permanently dropped in 1999; that year, over half the entries were sung in English. Indeed, since 1999, 22 of the 26 winning songs have been sung in English. This lingua franca reflects the global dominance of Anglo-American popular music and makes entries more accessible to a wider international audience. But the 2025 iteration of the contest saw a shift toward national languages again, with less than half of the entries sung in English. Does this shift reflect a trend of rising nationalism across Europe? In addition to English, French is also an official language of the European Broadcasting Union, so contest hosts announce the rules in French as well. “Nul points,” the dreaded score when no country gives a song any points at all, is not grammatically correct French, but rather a British affectation—one of the creative ways Eurovision plays with language.[4]
My parents were immigrants to the United States, refugees from war-torn Eastern Europe who learned a new language as they started a new life in this country. The childhood memories they shared with me, and my experiences with their close-knit expatriate communities here, indelibly shaped my own identity and worldviews. My grandmother and her three daughters fled Estonia with the retreating Germans in 1944 instead of facing the terror of the Soviet Army again. Later, they were able to emigrate to the US thanks to my great-aunt who had already settled here. My mother was ten years old when she saw the Statue of Liberty as their ship arrived at Ellis Island.
When I was growing up my mother taught me Estonian, including the numbers (üks, kaks, kolm, etc.). I recall doing a presentation for my first-grade class, singing a children’s song about the tricorne, the old-fashioned three-cornered hat, that she had taught me in Estonian. This song also has accompanying hand gestures to illustrate the hat on my head.[5]
| Mu mütsil on kolm nurka, kolm nurka on mu müts. Kui poleks ta kolm nurka, siis poleks ta mu müts. |
My hat, it has three corners, Three corners has my hat. If it didn’t have three corners, Then it would not be my hat. |
my = touch your chest
hat = touch your head three = hold up three fingers corners = fingertips together not = shake your head “no” |
This tune is actually a Neapolitan folk song, “O mamma, mamma cara,” also known as “The Carnival of Venice.” Years later, when I listened to Frederic Chopin’s Rondo no. 1, “Souvenir de Paganini,” I was delighted to recognize the same melody that I had sung in the Estonian children’s song. And in last year’s Eurovision show, I was even more delighted to hear counting up to three in Finnish, which sounds very much like Estonian, in Sweden’s popular entry, “Bara Bada Bastu.” I did not understand what the rest of this song was saying, so I had to look up the words bara (just), bada (bathe), bastu (sauna): literally, “Just take a sauna.” This entry ended up in fourth place in the contest, and now its refrain is permanently stuck in my head.
Questions of translation arise with Eurovision’s best-known winning song, “Waterloo” by ABBA, which was first sung in Swedish for Melodifestivalen, the annual contest that selects that country’s Eurovision entry.[6] The familiar English-language version of the song is a literal translation of the Swedish, but there is an intriguing difference in the second verse, with the line “And now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight.” The original Swedish is “mot känslor kämpar gudarna förgäves har man sagt” (against emotions the gods fight in vain, it has been said). This line is actually a paraphrase of a quote from Friedrich Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801), a dramatic reimagining of the life of Joan of Arc. Schiller wrote, “Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens” (against stupidity the gods fight in vain). But for their song lyrics, Benny and Björn changed the German Dummheit (stupidity) to the Swedish känslor (emotions). A subtle change, but it does invite reflection. Are emotions “stupid,” just basic instinctive reactions, as Darwin argued? Or are they complex cognitive processes enabling our emotional intelligence, quite the opposite of Dummheit?
I started thinking about translation more directly during last year’s contest when I found myself feeling annoyed that the Italian entry included on-screen English subtitles, which I had never seen in the show before. Lucio Corsi sang an introspective nostalgic indie-pop ballad about accepting one’s feeling of vulnerability: “Volevo essere un duro, però non sono nessuno” (I wanted to be a tough guy, but I’m a nobody). The Italian lyrics are poetically evocative, as with the line about people who find real life difficult because they cannot face hard facts; they have “too much sun in their glasses” (troppo sole negli occhiali). Corsi and the Italian team decided to include English subtitles to bridge “the gap between local storytelling and international appreciation.”[7] This song took a respectable fifth place in the contest. In trying to have the best of both worlds (evocative Italian plus accessible English), wouldn’t this be an unfair advantage if only one country did it? What if every non-English Eurovision entry included on-screen subtitles, like a foreign film would? I think that would distract from the sound and music of any language and make the competition feel overly literal and somewhat pedantic.
I was more intrigued by last year’s entry from Poland using projected words as part of its staging. “Gaja,” sung by Justyna Steczkowska, is an energetic ethno-electropop song honoring the Earth goddess and the power of women. In the bridge section there is a rhythmic chant with the words projected on the stage background in large white block letters: “zargo, raga, urra, gara, jarga, jarun, era, czarodoro.” The Polish team explained that these words are ancient Slavic agmas, spiritual mantras that can bring good fortune, health, strength, wisdom, creativity, and clairvoyance. “Each agma has its own power,” Steczkowska asserts. “It’s not just words, but energy that can transform reality.”[8] Robert Choinski questions whether this invocation of ancient Slavic spiritual mantras is really an authentic reconstruction or an invention of modern Neopaganism—merely “spiritual kitsch.” But he acknowledges—and this is the point about Eurovision languages, even imaginary ones—that song lyrics, like agmas, “remind us of the power of words—and that sometimes it’s enough to stop, breathe, and speak [or sing] one kind word to feel a change.”[9]
As a case study in translation across languages and cultures, consider “Kedvesem,” Hungary’s entry for the 2013 contest. This song had been selected to represent Hungary in the national preliminary contest, A Dal (The Song), where Alex Márta sang his song in Hungarian for the domestic audience and judges. Considering its indie-pop style and Márta’s presentation, what do we immediately understand about the song even if we do not know what its lyrics mean? It is in the key of C major, only moving from the home chord momentarily, so its vibe feels calm and cozy. The tempo is moderato with a steady pulsing ostinato in the acoustic guitar accompaniment. The melody is simple and repetitive, never straying far from where it starts, and Márta’s voice is gentle and a bit husky, lending his performance an air of intimacy and sincerity. Interviews and publicity clips from A Dal were also intended for the national audience. Márta explains that his song offers “a different genre, a different kind of sound.” One judge commented, “I feel like it dropped onto the planet Earth from somewhere else.”[10]
The music video was released after this song was selected to represent Hungary in Eurovision, but instead of a typical music video showing the singer or other people doing something as the song plays, this video shows the Hungarian song lyrics in a cartoon-style animation. How does this help viewers who do not know Hungarian understand the song? Except for the title, translated as “Sweetheart” or “My Darling,” the details of its message would be inaccessible to most viewers. YouTube comments from non-Hungarian viewers note the musical appeal of this song despite the language gap. “One of the best Eurovision songs ever, even I can’t understand a word,” writes one. “I don’t understand nothing but it transmits good vibrations and feelings,” asserts another.[11]
Hungarian is a famously poetic language thanks to its melodic cadence, vowel harmony rules, and agglutinative structure where suffixes attach to words to enable precise and compact meanings. A literal English translation of the first verse of the Hungarian song captures some of this evocative poetic quality: “My sweetheart is a girl who was raised by wolves and danced with a mirage, then quietly vanished; she is my darling.” But the official English translation for the song contest was rather different:
| “Kedvesem” lyrics by Alex Márta | English translation by Johnny K. Palmer |
| Az én kedvesem egy olyan lány akit Farkasok neveltek és Táncolt egy délibábbal Majd elillant csendesen, az én kedvesem Ő az én kedvesem |
She’s the one for me.
Say did you know she’s raised by wolves? Did you know she dances with dandelions, Then gently her head declines? The one for me, She is the one for me. |
Instead of “my darling,” the six syllables of “Ő az én kedvesem” scan neatly onto the English phrase “she is the one for me,” but “dandelions” seems to be a syllabic, not semantic, translation of the word “délibábbal,” which means “with a mirage,” probably a reference to the mystical Fata Morgana on the Puszta, the Hungarian plains. A certain degree of local and national association is lost in this translation. To publicize this song, the Hungarian team invited people on the street to translate these English-language song lyrics into their own native language, with some amusing and endearing results.[12]
For Eurovision, Márta insisted on singing in his native language for its more authentic and poetic sound. The staging included some English-language lyrics projected in the animation on screen. In the broadcast, only a few of them (such as “dandelions”) are visible because the camera often cut to close-up shots of the performers, so non-Hungarian viewers get very little assistance with the meaning. However, the audience inside the arena could see many more of the words of the translation than the televised broadcast showed, as one fan’s video from the jury finals reveals.[13] Even considering the linguistic inaccessibility of Hungarian and the minimal efforts the staging made to explain its meaning, this song was appealing enough to finish tenth in the final voting.
The strangeness of foreign languages is a major part of Eurovision’s international, multicultural, and cosmopolitan appeal. It is also a factor in the song contest’s inherent polarity balancing between multiple national and international, local and global contexts. It points as well to an underlying desire to discover other sides of our own identity. In French Lessons: A Memoir (1993), Alice Kaplan asks: “Why do people want to adopt another culture? Because there’s something in their own … that doesn’t name them.”[14] Robert Tobin recalled that
German was the language that helped me express myself, organize my thoughts, name my desires, and develop my sexuality. Raised as an American speaking English, I pivoted to this foreign language, the literature written in that language …, and critical language to discuss this literature—an intricate web of textuality—while coming of age and coming to terms with my own identity.[15]
Learning How to be a Foreigner
In Strangers to Ourselves (1994), Julia Kristeva explores the concept of the foreigner, outsider, or alien in a country and society not originally their own, and the feelings of alienation the foreigner might experience in this unfamiliar place. Through her psychoanalytical approach, Kristeva invites us to consider our own identity and the experience of feeling that “strangeness” within ourselves: “The foreigner lives within us,” she writes. “By recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.” In this perspective, nationalism produces the individual “jealous of his difference” and “victim to the ruts of monovalency.” Applying Kristeva’s concept to Eurovision, the contest encourages “individualism’s subversion, … when the citizen-individual ceases to consider himself as unitary and glorious but discovers his incoherences and abysses, in short, his ‘strangenesses.’” With its diverse languages and musical styles, and its negotiations of the frequently wide distances between the local and global, Eurovision invites “the togetherness of those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be.” It can affirm our many strangenesses.
Does the song contest form some idealistic cosmopolitan community? “Foreigners of the world, unite?” Kristeva reminds us of “the domination/exclusion fantasy” that would especially apply to such a competition:
just because one is a foreigner does not mean one is without one’s own foreigner, and the faith that abated at the source is suddenly rekindled at the journey’s end in order to make up from whole cloth an identity the more exclusive as it had once been lost. In France, Italians call the Spaniards foreigners, the Spaniards take it out on the Portuguese, the Portuguese on the Arabs or the Jews, the Arabs on the blacks, and so forth and vice versa. … [E]ven if there are links between one another, … these unfailingly snap when fanatical bonds fuse together again communities cemented by pure, hard fantasies.
Significant cultural and political controversies create divisions in the contest each year. But Eurovision does enact the lesson Kristeva defines: “The foreigner comes in when the consciousness of my difference arises, and he disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities.”[16] The value of learning how to be a foreigner is one lesson this song contest has always offered.
Ivan Raykoff is Professor of Music at The New School, where he teaches courses on music history, music theory, film music, and interdisciplinary arts. His book Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist (Oxford University Press, 2013) explores the concert pianist as a cultural icon. He co-edited A Song for Europe: Popular Music and Politics in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2007, and his follow-up book about the contest’s music is Another Song for Europe: Music, Taste, and Values in the Eurovision Song Contest (Routledge, 2021).
Notes
[1] European Broadcasting Union, “Record-Breaking Reach” (May 28, 2025), https://eurovision.tv/story/eurovision-2025-record-breaking-reach
[2] Ivan Raykoff, “The Mythology of Song Contests,” in: Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon: From Concert Halls to the Halls of Academia, eds. Adam Dubin, Dean Vuletic, and Antonio Obregón (Routledge, 2022), 57-67.
[3] Dean Vuletic, Postwar Europe and the Eurovision Song Contest (Bloomsbury, 2018). James Thomas, “Fact Check: Did NATO Create the Eurovision Song Contest?” (May 22, 2025),
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05/22/fact-check-did-nato-create-the-eurovision-song-contest
[4] “Nul points: Meanings and Origin,” https://wordhistories.net/2017/01/10/nul-points/
[5] “Mu mütsil on kolm nurka,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WqN9jJ-Dys
[6] “Melodifestivalen 1974 – Full Show,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-SCPSQhG6Y
[7] “Lucio Corsi Brings Tuscany to Eurovision with English Subtitles,” Florence Daily News (May 14, 2025), https://www.florencedailynews.com/2025/05/14/lucio-corsi-brings-tuscany-to-eurovision-with-english-subtitles/
[8] “‘Gaja’ Justyny Steczkowskiej – manifest osobistej mocy i transcendencji” (April 11, 2025),
https://www.tvp.pl/86099482/gaja-eurowizyjna-piosenka-justyny-steczkowskiej-co-oznaczaja-zawarte-w-niej-slowianskie-mantry#
[9] Robert Choinski, “Agmas: The spiritual power of the Slavs or an esoteric hoax?” Zwierciadło
(May 14, 2025), https://zwierciadlo.pl/lifestyle/549626,1,agmy–duchowa-moc-pradawnych-ludow-czy-ezoteryczna-mistyfikacja-cala-prawda-o-slowianskich-mantrach.read
[10] “Kedvesem (Márta Alex, Zoohacker) ByeAlex – A Dal 2013 középdöntő – MTVA,”
[11] “ByeAlex – Kedvesem (Zoohacker Remix) (LIVE) Hungary | Grand Final Eurovision 2013,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOimfHq76xk
[12] Sanjay (Sergio) Jiandani, “Hungary: The Kedvesem International Campaign,” ESCToday.com (April 23, 2016), https://esctoday.com/49871/hungary-the-kedsevem-international-campaign;
“Translate ByeAlex ‘Kedvesem – ONE 4 ME’ to your language!” (April 8, 2013), www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAcsut_ilO0
[13] “Kedvesem – ByeAlex (Hungary) Jury Grand Final – ESC 2013,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NExe0HKb1I
[14] Alice Kaplan, French Lessons: A Memoir (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 209.
[15] Robert Tobin, “Confessional: Sexuality and Textuality,” The German Quarterly 97 (2024),
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gequ.12439
[16] Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (Columbia University Press, 1991), 1-3, 7, 24.
