The Grand Final of the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest featured 21 songs with non-English lyrics, the most to appear since the language rule was abolished in 1999. In this episode, we'll explore the history of the language rule and why language diversity has returned to the Contest.

The EuroWhat? Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Find your podcast app to subscribe here.

Comments, questions, and episode topic suggestions are always welcome. You can shoot us an email or reach out on Bluesky @eurowhat.bsky.social.

If you would like to help financially support the show, we are hosting the EuroWhat AV Club over on Patreon! We have a slew of bonus episodes with deep dives on Eurovision-adjacent topics.

What is the Eurovision Podcrawl? It's where the Eurovision podcast community picks a topic ("a year when a country first hosted Eurovision") and we all publish our episodes in our own styles. At the end of an episode, we'll point to the podcast with the next episode, and so on, through the summer! Here's the crawl:

Support The EuroWhat? Podcast: Eurovision News & Reviews

Links:

• 276 Lingua Franca Playlist - YouTube
• Episode 59: 12 Angry Points
• Episode 209: Millstreet
• IDEA åk Sverden: DEKØDER Instructions