The Quiet Return of Many Tongues

On Eurovision, language, and the slow undoing of sameness

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Eurovision Song Contest felt like a slow ritual of forgetting. Since the lifting of language restrictions in 1999, year after year, entry after entry, a curious flattening took place: more glitter, more pyrotechnics — and more English. What began as a European celebration of cultural expression became, for many of us, something closer to a marketing show in a single voice. I stopped watching.

Not because I disliked English. I write in it. I speak it daily. It is, undeniably, the shared tongue of much of our world. But Eurovision, at its best, was never meant to be a showcase of convenience. It was meant to be a mirror of difference — a place where nations did not posture, but presented something of their inner texture: their sound, their story, their soul.

Which is why this year, unexpectedly, I returned.

The 2025 contest, held in Basel, marked a quiet turning point. For the first time in decades, the grand final featured songs performed in twenty different languages — the widest spread since the rule change a quarter-century ago. Some were expected (French, Spanish, Italian), others more surprising: Icelandic, Georgian, Vörå Swedish, even Montenegrin. And though English remained dominant, with nineteen entries at least partially in it, the balance had begun to shift. Something old was resurfacing. Or perhaps, something necessary.

This slow return of linguistic diversity is not only a musical trend. It reflects something deeper: a growing resistance to the idea that being understood requires being uniform. The argument has always been that English ensures accessibility. But does it really? Most Europeans do not speak English as a first language. Many do not speak it fluently at all. And even among those who do, how many truly experience a pop lyric — with all its idioms, slang, and intonations — as transparent?

Besides, music is not a briefing. It does not pass through us as information alone. It enters, when it works, by other doors: rhythm, colour, cadence, voice. Some of the most moving songs I’ve ever heard were in languages I do not speak: Faroese, Tatar, Punjabi. I did not grasp the literal meaning. But I understood enough. Because meaning is more than message. It is presence, expression, atmosphere — the feeling that someone, somewhere, has chosen to stand in their own voice and offer it to others.

To hear Greek sung on a European stage, or Latvian, or Hebrew, is not merely to be reminded that these languages exist. It is to be reminded that each carries a history, a way of perceiving, a rhythm of thought. Language is not neutral. It shapes what can be said and how it is felt. The cadence of Georgian is not the cadence of Polish. Swedish in the Vörå dialect is not simply “Swedish” — it is a village, a landscape, a history sung aloud. To ignore this is to pretend that language is a mere code, rather than a form of life.

And so when Eurovision becomes monolingual, it does not become simpler — it becomes thinner. Something essential is lost.

There is, of course, a danger in fetishising difference. Not every return to a national tongue is an act of cultural courage. Sometimes it is strategy. Sometimes it is sentiment. Sometimes, admittedly, it is gimmick. But that does not discredit the broader direction. Because if even a handful of artists are choosing to sing in their native language not to win, but to honour where they are from — that is enough. It restores to the contest something of its original spirit: not a pageant of metrics, but a field of expression.

And perhaps we are slowly beginning to see that identity is not only performance. It is voice — actual, audible voice — shaped by the rhythms one learned as a child, the vowels that came first. Eurovision, at its best, allows us to listen to how others sound when they are not translating themselves. That alone is worth recovering.

It is true that English can serve as a shared medium. But when it becomes the only one, it ceases to be a bridge and becomes a filter. Everyone sings in English, but no one quite says what they mean. The result is not connection but dilution. And in a time when much of public life is already pressed through algorithms, analytics, and artificial cheer, we should be wary of inviting further flattening into spaces that were made, however imperfectly, for celebration.

Because the deeper problem here is not musical, but moral: the idea that we must all compress ourselves into a single shape to be legible. That the only way to be heard is to speak like everyone else. But that, surely, is not communication. It is erosion. It may feel efficient, but it comes at the cost of inner fidelity.

This question of voice — of how we sound, and what we choose to carry through language — has also led me to begin a small parallel project: Limaroj, a new Substack in Esperanto. Still in its early stages, it's a place to reflect, occasionally and quietly, in a language built not for power, but for mutual legibility. I mention it here only because the question of linguistic space — of what it means to speak deliberately in a world of noise — is not abstract. It is lived, every day.

Language, after all, is never just a tool. It is a form of life. And when we stop hearing the different ways life can sound, we lose more than we realise. We lose the feel of other minds. We lose the friction that slows us down just enough to notice what another person is actually saying. We lose nuance, shadow, tone — all the subtle cues that make conversation human.

So this year, I listened again. And what I heard — amid the costumes and chaos — was not just melody, but memory. A chorus of accents and cadences once thought too parochial for the stage, now slowly reappearing. Not triumphantly. But seriously. Modestly. As if to say: we are still here, and this is still ours.

And that, I think, is what Eurovision was always meant to be.

Miklós Cseszneky