TONDER, Denmark – Folk musician Billy Fumey took to the stage in this quaint market town in rural Denmark on Friday night, intoning an intense love song in the endangered language of Franco-Provençal. As he belted out a lyrical description of hair blowing in the wind – ‘Kma tsèkion de tèt frissons da l’oura lèdzira’ – few of the 500 listeners had any idea what he was singing about, but it didn’t seem to matter. When the yodel-heavy track came to an end, the crowd still clapped wildly.
Moments later, Carolina Rubirosa, a Spanish rock musician who sings in Galician, got a similar reaction. So did Jimi Henndreck, a psychedelic rock band from Italy, who sang a rough number in South Tyrolean, a German dialect. So does Inga-Maret Gaup-Juuso, an electronic artist who sings in a language of the Sami natives of northern Europe.
All took part in Liet International, a European singing competition for regional and minority languages. After she finished her entry, Rubirosa switched to English to address the beer-drinking crowd. “It’s a dream to be here today,” she said, “with my language, outside of my country.” Minority languages are vital, Rubirosa added. “We don’t have to let them die.”
Around 200 million people will tune in to the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday to hear music from across the continent. The 25 pop stars who will compete in the final include those performing in Italian, Spanish and Ukrainian. But the millions of people in Europe who speak one of the many regional and minority languages are unlikely to find themselves on the Eurovision Song Contest stage, let alone their country’s pop charts.
Since 2002, Liet International has provided a platform for musicians from these communities – although it’s miles away from the flashy spectacle of a Eurovision finale. Friday’s event took place at the Kulturhaus, a small hall next to a care facility for older adults in Tonder, a German-speaking region of Denmark. The 13 acts shared tiny dressing rooms and applied their own makeup. The evening’s hosts, Stefi Wright and Niklas Nissen, have day jobs as teachers and builders.
The event, which was livestreamed on the competition’s YouTube page, only garnered 944 views, although a replay will soon be televised in the Netherlands.
Uffe Iwersen, one of the organizers of the event, said the budget is around 100,000 euros or about $104,000, so the organizers couldn’t afford spectacular stage designs or pyrotechnics. He insisted it didn’t matter. “The languages are more important than explosions and the biggest light show in the world,” said Iwersen.
Tjallien Kalsbeek, one of the organizers of the competition, said that Liet International had its roots in a competition created by a Dutch TV station in the 1990s. This competition aimed to find new pop music in West Frisian, a language spoken by about 450,000 people in the north of the Netherlands.
That competition was a hit, Kalsbeek said, and it grew into an annual event that has expanded over time to include rap and techno entries. To mark the 10th anniversary, organizers put on a special edition with performances in other minority languages, including Basque, Occitan and Welsh. This was the first Liet International; Friday was the 13th edition.
The status of minority languages in Europe varies greatly. Some, like Catalan, are spoken by millions of people, others, like North Frisian, native to northern Germany, have only a few thousand speakers left and are threatened with extinction, according to UNESCO.
Elin Jones, professor of linguistic diversity at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, said over the phone that regional languages, protected by national governments and taught in schools like Welsh, are thriving. But in countries like France, Greece and Russia, minority languages were more at risk because children are usually only taught the local language.
Jones said all minority languages should be supported. “They’re an integral part of people’s identities, like sexuality or ethnicity,” she said.
Several of those attending Liet International on Friday came from areas where speaking a minority language could be seen as a political act, including Sardinia, where some activists are calling for more autonomy from Italy, and Corsica, the Mediterranean island where it is to be granted this year Clashes came after a Corsican activist was beaten up in a French prison.
On stage on Friday, Doria Ousset, a Corsican singer with a six-piece band, sang an epic rock lament for a 17th-century Corsican soldier slated for execution by French troops. The hosts then asked about their inspiration in a stage interview. “The French state doesn’t want us to know the story, so we have to sing it,” Ousset said. “That is our mission.”
However, in interviews with The New York Times, four other acts said they sing in regional languages for reasons unrelated to politics. Roger Argemí, a young pop singer from Spain’s Catalonia region, said he wrote music mainly in English or Spanish, “but when I want to express my true feelings I use Catalan” – the language of his childhood. Catalan sounds “a lot sweeter and more melodious” than Spanish, he added.
As far removed as Liet International seemed from the glamor of Eurovision, there was at least one element it shared with its better-known rival on Friday: a tense voting process. Just after 10pm, the night’s acts took the stage to listen while members of a jury read out their scores one by one.
As a ranking was shuffled with each new result, it became clear that this was a three-horse race between Ousset, the Corsican singer; Yourdaughters, two sisters from northern Germany’s Danish-speaking minority who sang a dreamy R&B track; and Rubirosa, the Galician songwriter.
Since a judge’s scores were yet to be disclosed, there were only a few points between those three acts. But as the judge read out the points, Ousset moved forward. When she was announced as the winner, she collapsed in shock in the arms of her bandmates and then rushed to the front of the stage, waving the Corsican flag.
“How do you feel?” asked Nissen, one of the hosts, in English. Ousset responded in Corsican with a long, tearful speech. Very few people in the audience understood a word she said. But they clapped and cheered anyway.
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