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 Turkish, Udmurt, and Ukrainian.

Turkish

Turkish is the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages with around 90 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey and one of two official languages of Cyprus. Significant smaller groups of Turkish speakers also exist in Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Greece and other parts of Europe, the South Caucasus and some parts of Central Asia, Iraq and Syria. Turkish is the 18th-most spoken language in the world.

Turkish appeared in full, within “Seninle Bir Dakika”, the Turkish entry for the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest. Semiha Yankı performed “Seninle Bir Dakika”, finishing in 19th place with 3 points.

Udmurt

Udmurt is a Permic language spoken by the Udmurt people who are native to Udmurtia. As a Uralic language, it is distantly related to languages such as Finnish, Estonian, Mansi, Khanty and Hungarian. The Udmurt language is co-official with Russian within Udmurtia.

Udmurt appeared in full, within “Party for Everybody”, the Russian entry for the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest. Buranovskiye Babushki performed “Party for Everybody”, finishing in 2nd place with 259 points.

Ukrainian

Ukrainian is an East Slavic language, spoken primarily in Ukraine. It is the first (native) language of a large majority of Ukrainians.

Ukrainian appeared within lines of “Wild Dances”, the Ukrainian entry for the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest. Ruslana performed “Wild Dances”, finishing in 1st place with 280 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 Stuff/EBU