While a lot of websites have focussed on the potential manipulation and/or corruption of the online voting system, we noticed the choice of languages you could view the platform didn’t necessarily accommodate all the participating countries.

The languages available for voting are:

• English
• Dutch
• Italian
• Russian
• Serbian
• Polish
• Portugese

While these languages cover most of the native speakers of the participating countries, we found two notable exceptions:

• Greek – for the Cypriots
• Georgian – completely different alphabet

I reached out to a European Broadcasting Union representative for a statement:

“As with every year, English and French are the default languages for the Eurovision live events. We have built our new voting platform with that in mind, but have also added some of our widest used languages as additional options, and selected these options in the hope of achieving consistency over the next few years.

Of course, not all languages could be built into the platform, but we will of course carefully review those selected ahead of next year.”

So while French isn’t even listed in the languages on the online voting platform as a default EBU language, they seem to be willing to review this in future editions.

Author: Richard Taylor – LIVE in Tbilisi

Source: Eurovision Ireland