This year, the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest featured a record breaking twenty languages. Eurovision Ireland will be looking at all the languages that have been performed at the Contest, since 1956, in our latest #AtoZ. Today, we continue the series with Finnish, French and French Sign Language.

Finnish

Finnish is a Finnic language of the Uralic language family, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland. Finnish is one of the two official languages of Finland, alongside Swedish. In Sweden, both Finnish and Meänkieli are official minority languages. Kven, which like Meänkieli is mutually intelligible with Finnish, is spoken in the Norwegian counties of Troms and Finnmark by a minority of Finnish descent.

Finnish appeared in full, within “Valoa ikkunassa”, the Finnish entry for the 1961 Eurovision Song Contest. Laila Kinnunen performed “Valoa ikkunassa”, finishing in 10th place with 6 points.

French

French is a Romance language of the Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d’oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French largely supplanted. It was also influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were developed. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Francophone in both English and French.

French appeared in full, within “Messieurs les noyés de la Seine”, the Belgian entry for the 1956 Eurovision Song Contest. Fud Leclerc performed “Messieurs les noyés de la Seine”, finishing in an undisclosed place.

French Sign Language

French Sign Language is the sign language of deaf and hard-of-hearing people in France and in French-speaking parts of Switzerland. According to Ethnologue, it has 100,000 native signers.

French Sign Language appeared in full, within “Roi”, the French entry for the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest. Bilal Hassani performed “Roi”, finishing in 16th place with 105 points.

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The Eurovision Community, which Eurovision Ireland are a part of, celebrates diversity through music. Please keep your comments respectful. We will not tolerate racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, body-shaming or any other derogatory or hostile language.

Author: Richard Taylor

Source: Eurovision Ireland, Wikipedia & YouTube/ESC:56-73/EBU