TONDER, Denmark – Folk musician Billy Fumey strutted the stage Friday night in the quaint market town in the Danish countryside and unleashed an intense love song in the endangered language of Franco-Provencal. When he pops out a lyrical description of his hair blowing in the wind – “Kma tsèkion de tèt frissons da l’oura lèdzira” – few in the 500 audience have no idea what he is singing about, but there are doesn’t seem important. Anyway, when the heavy track ended, the crowd clapped wildly.
Some time later, Carolina Rubirosa, a Spanish rock musician singing in Galicia, received a similar reaction. So did Jimi Henndreck, a psychedelic rock band from Italy who sang some hoarse in South Tyrolean, a dialect of Germany. So does Inga-Maret Gaup-Juuso, an electronic artist who sings in the language of the Indigenous Sami people of Northern Europe.
All participate Paralysis International, a European song competition for regional and ethnic languages. After completing her entry, Rubirosa switched to English to speak to the beer-drinking crowd. “It is a dream to be here today,” she said, “in my language, outside of my country.” Rubirosa added that minority languages are important. “We don’t have to let them die.”
About 200 million people will follow Europe Regional Song Contest on Saturdays to listen to music from all over the continent. 25 pop stars will compete in the final including performers in Italian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Yet the millions of people in Europe who speak one of the many regional and ethnic languages are unlikely to find themselves represented on the Eurovision stage, let alone their country’s pop charts.
Since 2002, Liet International has provided a platform for musicians from these communities – although it’s a world away from the dazzling spectacle of a Eurovision final. Friday’s event happened at the House of Culture, a small hall next to the aged care facility in Tonder, a German-speaking part of Denmark. 13 artists shared their own little dressing rooms and makeup. Evening hosts, Stefi Wright and Niklas Nissen, have day jobs as teachers and masons.
Event, that is live streaming on the contest’s YouTube page, which has only garnered 944 views, although an audio recording will soon be broadcast on television in the Netherlands.
Uffe Iwersen, one of the event’s organizers, said its budget was around 100,000 euros, or about $104,000, so the organizers couldn’t afford to pay for theatrical set-ups or fireworks. coated. It doesn’t matter, he insists. “Languages are more important than the biggest explosions and light show on earth,” says Iwersen.
Tjallien Kalsbeeksaid one of the organizers of the contest, Liet International has its origins in a contest started by Dutch television in the 1990s. It was aimed at finding new pop music in West Frisian, a language The language is spoken by about 450,000 people in the north of the Netherlands.
That contest was a resounding success, Kalsbeek said, and it became an annual event, expanding over time to include rap and techno entries. On its 10th anniversary, the organizers organized a special edition featuring performances in other minority languages including Basque, Occitan and Welsh. This is the first International List; Friday’s is the 13th edition.
The status of minority languages in Europe varies widely. Some, like Catalan, are spoken by millions, but others, like North Frisian, native to northern Germany, have only a few thousand speakers left and are endangered, according to UNESCO.
Elin Jones, a professor of linguistic diversity at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, said by phone that regional languages are protected by national governments and taught in schools like Welsh is growing. strong. But in countries including France, Greece and Russia, minority languages are at greater risk, because children are often only educated in the national language.
Jones says all minority languages should be supported. “They are an integral part of human identity, like gender or ethnicity,” she said.
Some of Friday’s International Listing participants come from areas where speaking a minority language can be seen as a political act, including Sardinia, where some activists want more autonomy from Italy and Corsica, the Mediterranean island, where this year Conflict broke out after a Corsican activist was beaten inside a French prison.
On stage on Friday, Doria Ousset, a Corsican singer with a six-piece band, sang an epic rock song for a 17th-century Corsican soldier facing French execution. Later, in an onstage interview, the host asked about her inspiration. “The French state didn’t want us to know about history, so we had to sing it,” Ousset said. “That’s our mission.”
However, in interviews with The New York Times, four other artists said they sang in regional languages for reasons unrelated to politics. Roger Argemí, a young pop singer from Catalonia, Spain, says he writes mostly in English or Spanish, “but when I want to express my true feelings, I use it. Catalan” – the language of his childhood. Catalan sounds “much sweeter and more melodious” than Spanish, he added.
As it has removed Liet International from Eurovision’s glitz, there is at least one element it shares with Friday’s more famous rival: a tense voting process. Immediately after 10 p.m., the night’s acts took to the stage to listen as members of the jury took turns reading their scores.
As the rankings were reshuffled with each new score, it became clear that this was a three-horse race between Ousset, the Corsican singer; Your daughter, two sisters from Northern Germany who speak Danish, who sang a poetic R&B track; and Rubirosa, Galician musician.
With one judge’s score left to reveal, there were only a few points between those three performances. But when the judge read out the points, Ousset moved forward. When she was announced as the winner, she collapsed into the arms of her bandmates in shock, then rushed to the front of the stage waving the Corsica flag.
“How do you feel?” Nissen, one of the hosts, asked in English. Ousset replied in Corsican with a long, tearful speech. Very few people in the audience understood what she said. But they clapped and cheered anyway.
