When language attitudes collide with a chance at Eurovision

Disclaimer: I don’t know much about Eurovision politics, beyond the obvious. I do know something, however, about language attitudes.  

Now let’s consider this set of language attitudes: Eurovision Finland/Sweden 2025.

Currently, the song Bara Bada Bastu (perhaps best translated as ‘just sauna bathe’ in English – but it sounds much better in Swedish!) is hitting the airwaves and making a splash (pun intended) as it has just made the finals in the Swedish Melodifestivalen 2025. The outcome of the Melodifestivalen, which will be decided tomorrow, determines which musical act will represent Sweden at the Eurovision Song Contest this year. In Europe, this is a Big Deal – and it looks like KAJ, the group that performs the song, has a good chance of winning with their catchy song and energetic performance.  

The thing is, the group that performs the song is from Finland, from a mostly Swedish-speaking area called Ostrobothnia, and, more specifically, the subregion known as (in Finnish) as Vöyri. Their song is all about the most quintessential of Finnish activities, sauna bathing, and the song also contains many elements of the Finnish language, intermixed with the Swedish. So why are they competing in the Swedish song finals, instead of in Finland?  

I am glad you asked. Here is where the language attitude side of things comes into play.  

In 57 years of entering the Eurovision Song Contest, 33 of the song entries from Finland been sung in Finnish. Twenty have been in English. One song, from 1994, was in a mix of Finnish and English. Two of the Finnish song entries have been in Swedish, one of which ultimately failed to qualify. 

Finland has two Constitutional languages: Finnish and Swedish. Let that sink in for a moment. The two national languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish, yet there have only been two Eurovision song contest entries from Finland in Swedish, while there have been 20 in English. It is worth pointing out that English has no official status in Finland.  

There are several competing explanations going on here. One of them is that English is, as we all know by now, is a hugely influential language in the international music industry. It was a watershed/Waterloo (sorry-not-sorry about all the puns) moment back in 1974 when the famous Swedish band ABBA performed their song Waterloo in ENGLISH and ultimately won the song contest. For the Nordic countries and for Europe, this stands out as a classic moment when we knew that English had penetrated our collective consciousness and existence.  

Back to Finland. It really tells you something that a Swedish language song  is exported to Sweden in order to stand a chance at making it to the Eurovision Song Contest in 2025. 

Without knowing the exact details of how and why this came to happen, the context and overall language attitudes explain a lot. It seems self-evident that a song in English, like Finland’s only winning Eurovision song to date, Hard Rock Hallelujah (by Lordi, 2006), is apparently seen as less ‘foreign’ and more ‘Finnish’ than a song in Swedish about sauna, the most iconic of Finnish cultural artefacts. That is: a Swedish language song, regardless of its topic, probably wouldn’t stand a chance among the Finnish population, because it is seen as too ‘other,’ too non-mainstream Finnish. And, as a reminder, Swedish is a national language of Finland, while English is not. Swedish is a national language which happens to be spoken by only about 5 percent of the overall population, but it is a national language nonetheless.

It will be interesting to see what happens if and when KAJ makes it to the Eurovision Song Contest competition, especially if they do well (and I hope they will). In line with the language attitude and speech community dynamics, I predict that the group will be blamed for opting to compete in Sweden rather than Finland, as if they were cultural traitors to Finland. This sentiment will be compounded by the painful fact that Finland has traditionally not done very well at the Eurovision Song Contest, whereas Sweden has won more times than I can remember—including the difficult contest two years ago when the crowd favorite, Finnish Käärijä, lost out in the end to the predictable Swedish classic Eurovision singer Loreen. Ouch!

But, from the group KAJ’s point of view, it was a strategic move to compete in Sweden, as they would certainly have risked being ‘othered’ in the Finnish competition. This is because anti-Swedish-language sentiments in Finland at large are very strong now, and have been for some time, but in Sweden they could capitalize on their quaint 'otherness.'

This is an extremely complex issue with a lot of history behind it. But for now we will leave it at that.