Singing in a mother tongue

4 MIN READ

It would be fair to say that English dominates the lyrics of contemporary popular music considered world-class. With some exceptions of French and German, English remains the primary language choice to reach a wide audience and increase popularity. Even K-pop artists cannot resist it.

Nevertheless, I would argue that it is arduous work and a strenuous effort to be creative and be able to create in other languages but your own. I am not convinced I could find the best and the most expressive ways to describe the idea and the emotion I would like to convey. I am not sure the words I choose would sound as convincing as I would like them to be. I honestly believe in the power of words and the connotations they carry with them. They play a tremendous role in making others understand and feel what the intention to express is. Writing a piece of poetry in a mother tongue, song lyrics, in this case, creates a fundamental condition for the writer’s artistic freedom to get unbridled, the creativity to bloom out and reach its full potential. English is widely spread, and everybody seems to speak it, but it is not everybody’s mother tongue to freely create and produce art in it or be heard and understood the way one intends to. Or is it?

This year’s Eurovision Song Contest in Rotterdam was dazzling, iridescent, and, I would dare to claim, in many ways historic. One of the sweet surprises of the night was four out of five top winning songs sung in mother tongues and other than English: Italian, French, and Ukrainian to be exact, with Italian song taking the win. I was just finishing my brush-up Italian language course at the time, and it could not be a better way to celebrate the accomplishment.

Although, as every year, English was prevailing, other nations made themselves loud and clear in a variety of languages. The Albanian song was in Albanian, the Serbian – in Serbian, the host country, the Netherlands, had a part of theirs written in Sranan Tongo (spoken in Suriname). The song of Russia dedicated to Russian women was too a mix of two languages, Russian and English. The Nordic countries usually do not compete with a song entry in their native languages, but Denmark made an exception this year. Its duo entry for the first time since 1997 went back to the old tradition of singing in Danish though not successfully and did not make it to the finals. Song lyrics were the reason behind the fiasco of Belarus’ attempt to enter the contest. Even if camouflaged in Russian, the song’s lyrics were interpreted and considered to have too political of a subtext. The song was replaced with another, again sung in Russian, and was once again rejected, costing the nation their ticket to the festival. Surprisingly, Portugal’s entry’s language this year was English, breaking with tradition to sing in Portuguese, which brought victory to the nation in 2017. While most of the songs awarded the prize throughout 65 years of Eurovision Song Contest existence contained English texts, there have been winners with lyrics in French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Serbian, Crimean Tatar, and, of course, Portuguese.

The Eurovision Song Contest, or Melodi Grand Prix as they call it in Norway, and het Songfestival as they call it in Belgium, has its own history regarding language. It started in 1956 with a requirement for all the participants to represent their country in their country’s national language. Sweden broke the rule in 1965, and thus the strict language rule has been imposed the following year, allowing lyrics in national languages only. Some skeptics argued it could not work because the judges did not understand songs’ content, and so the language rule was relaxed in 1973. This is how ABBA’s Waterloo became a winner the year later. In 1977, the language rule was laid back on the discussion table and reversed again. It lasted until 1999, when it gained the permanent current status of language freedom.

The question is whether music requires lyrics at all. Secret Garden‘s Nocturne, the Norwegian winning song of the contest in 1995, practically had no lyrics – one line of more or less 24 Norwegian words in total. The rest of the song was played by wind and string instruments with a violin as a soloist. Though not winning, some other participant songs have contained as few as 11 words like Rendez-vous, which represented Belgium in 1983, and even fewer words, six, was in the Finnish entry Aava of 1998. What about other music, like scat singing or an opera performance? Do we always follow the words and their content in Italian or, let’s say, even English when hearing our beloved aria? I must be honest I don’t. It is the melody and the pitch of the singer’s voice that make my eyes water. OK fine.., the lyrics to the tune make it more memorable, it allows to sing or croon it along and together with other folks, even if the lyrics are not fully comprehended or properly pronounced. And it is certainly one of the ways to learn a foreign language.

Source: Eurovision official site