The following list is of languages used in the Eurovision Song Contest since its inception in 1956, including songs (as) performed in finals and, since 2004, semi-finals.
The rules concerning the language of the entries have been changed several times. In the past, the contest's organisers have sometimes compelled countries to only sing in their own national languages, but since 1999 no such restriction has existed.
History From until , there was no rule restricting the language(s) in which the songs could be sung. For example, Ingvar Wixell representing , sang his song "Absent Friend" in English. After this, a rule was imposed that a song must be performed in one of the official languages of the country participating. This new language policy remained in place until .
From 1973 to inclusive, participants were allowed to enter songs in any language. Several winners took advantage of this, with songs in English by countries where other languages are spoken, this included ABBA's "Waterloo" representing , and Teach-In's "Ding-a-dong" representing the .
In , the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) reimposed the national language restriction. However, and were given a special dispensation to use English, as their national song selection procedures were already too advanced to change. During the language rule, the only countries which were allowed to sing in English were Ireland, Malta, and the United Kingdom as English is an official language in those countries. The restriction was imposed from 1977 to .
From onwards, a free choice of language was again allowed. Since then, several participating broadcasters have chosen songs that mixed languages, often English and the national language of their country. Prior to that, songs such as "Don't Ever Cry" (), "One Step" (), and "Goodbye" () had a title and one line of the song in a non-native language. Edyta Górniak, representing , caused a scandal when she broke the rules by singing her song in English during the dress rehearsal (which is shown to the juries who selected the winner). Only six participating broadcasters demanded that Poland should be disqualified, and with the rules requiring at least 13 of them to complain, the proposed removal did not occur.
Since , some songs have used constructed languages (conlangs): two Belgian entries were entirely written in constructed languages: "Sanomi" in and "O Julissi" in . "Amambanda", representing the , was sung partly in English and partly in a conlang.
The entry which used the most languages was "It's Just a Game", which represented . It was performed in English and French, with some lyrics in Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, Gaelic, Serbo-Croatian, Hebrew, Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian. "Love Unlimited", representing , had mainly lyrics in Bulgarian, but with phrases in Turkish, Greek, Spanish, Serbo-Croatian, French, Balkan Romani, Italian, Azerbaijani, Arabic and English. "Pozdrav svijetu", representing , was mainly sung in Croatian, but also had phrases in Spanish, German, French, English, Dutch, Italian, Russian, and Finnish.
For the first time since the reintroduction of a free choice of language in 1999, more than half of the entries of the used their representative country's national language. Out of 37 entries, 26 were at least partially in one of their national languages and 11 did not use their national language(s). This was also the first contest since 1998 where less than half of the songs were fully in English, with only 12 fully English-language songs, and 3 of these songs represented countries in which English is an official language (Ireland, Malta and the United Kingdom). After adding the 6 songs which used English in addition to their country's national languages, Estonia and the Netherlands which used English along with other foreign languages and the primarily English-language Australian entry which contained a line in French, 21 songs in total contained English and 16 contained no English lines at all. Sweden was represented by a song in Swedish for the first time , Germany was represented by a song mainly in German for the first time , and Latvia was represented by a song entirely in Latvian for the second time in its history, with the other being .
the only country that has never entered a song completely in one or more of its official, regional or national languages is , which has never entered a song fully in the Azerbaijani language (although the aforementioned Bulgarian entry "Love Unlimited" contained a line in the language; "Mata Hari", , contained a repeated phrase; the chorus of "", , is in Azerbaijani; and "Just Go", , is partially in Azerbaijani). has never used Monégasque, its traditional national language, but French is Monaco's official and most commonly spoken language, and all of Monaco's entries have been entirely or primarily in French. The country which has gone the longest without using a native language is Sweden, which did not use any from the start of the language rule being lifted in 1999 until "", which represented . The last time before this that Sweden willingly sent a song in the Swedish language (i.e. without a language rule in place) was in 1963. The country which currently has the longest non-native language streak is Belgium, which has not used any of its three official languages since "", which represented , in which the repetition of the title phrase is the only French used. Serbia is the latest non-anglophone country to send a song containing English for the first time, doing so . It was also the latest non-anglophone country to send a song fully in English for the first time until Luxembourg's , Mother Nature.
On the other hand, there are nine countries whose representatives have performed all their songs at least partially in an official, regional or national language: , , , , , , , and the , as well as the two former countries of and . In addition, Morocco (Arabic is an official language) and former country Serbia and Montenegro (Serbo-Croatian was an official language) have both only been represented by songs fully in an official language, although these are also the two countries with the fewest number of participations, participating once and twice respectively.
The only editions not to feature any English-language entries were 1956 and , while was the first time in the history of the event that no entry was performed in French – with the two being the official languages of the contest. In 1956 and 1958, no Anglophone country participated, whereas in 2022, the three Francophone participants entered songs in English (Belgium and Switzerland) and Breton (France) respectively. While non-Francophone countries have in the past sent entries wholly or partially in French, none did so in 2022.
Criticism French legislator François-Michel Gonnot criticised broadcaster France Télévisions and launched an official complaint in the French Parliament, as the song which represented , "Divine" by Sébastien Tellier, was sung in English. A similar incident occurred again in 2014, when Ruth Lorenzo was criticised by the Royal Spanish Academy after winning the with her song "Dancing in the Rain", which contained some lyrics in English.
Spoken languages in the contest The following natural languages have appeared in at least one competing entry in the Eurovision Song Contest:
Abkhaz Albanian; incl. Gheg Albanian Arabic Aramaic Armenian Azerbaijani Belarusian Breton Bulgarian Catalan Corsican Crimean Tatar Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian; incl. Võro Finnish; incl. Karelian French French Creole; incl. Martinican Creole Georgian German; incl. Mühlviertlerisch Styrian Viennese German Vorarlbergish Greek; incl. Ancient Greek Cypriot Greek Pontic Greek Hawaiian Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Irish Italian; incl. Broccolino Latin Latvian Lithuanian; incl. Samogitian Luxembourgish Macedonian Maltese Neapolitan Northern Sámi Norwegian Polish Portuguese Proto-Slavic Romani; incl. Balkan Romani Carpathian Romani Romanian Romansh Russian Sanskrit Serbo-Croatian; incl. Bosnian Croatian; incl. Chakavian Dalmatian Croatian Montenegrin Serbian; incl. Torlakian Slovak Slovene Spanish; incl. Andalusian Spanish Sranan Tongo Swahili Swedish; incl. Finland Swedish; incl. Vörå Swedish Tahitian Turkish Udmurt Ukrainian; incl. Surzhyk Yankunytjatjara
Amharic was due to be included for the first time at the cancelled 2020 contest.
Language families Most Europeans speak one or several Indo-European languages as a first language, second language or both. Of the main branches of Indo-European, Germanic and Romance have been represented at every contest. Balto-Slavic languages, another branch of Indo-European with hundreds of millions of speakers, were first introduced to the contest by Yugoslavia and have become more common after the end of the Cold War as more and more countries with a Slavic national language participated. The Baltic subgroup of Baltoslavic has only sporadically appeared as these languages have few speakers outside Lithuania and Latvia. Smaller branches such as Hellenic languages, Albanoid, Celtic languages (including Breton and Irish), Armenian languages and others have likewise depended on whether the national broadcaster representing that language participates and selects an entry in that language. For example despite Irish being de jure a co-official national language in Ireland, there has been only one Irish-language entry, but two in Breton, a language that has been actively fought against by the French state in the 20th century. While the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European includes some of the most spoken languages in the world, few people in EBU member states speak one of those languages and thus their presence at Eurovision thus far has been minimal.
Non-Indo-European languages have been appearing since the 1960s. The first group to appear were the Uralic languages which include Northern Sámi, Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. In the 1970s Semitic languages (of the wider Afroasiatic family) which have been represented by the Maltese language, Hebrew and various varieties of Arabic first appeared in the contest. The Turkic languages have mostly been represented by Turkey (Azeri which is also a Turkic language has only been used for a few lines in a few songs thus far). As Turkey hasn't participated since 2012, the representation of Turkic languages has decreased. The Pama–Nyungan family of Australian Aboriginal languages was represented by Yankunytjatjara in 2024.
Besides those languages that have notable communities of native speakers in EBU member states, there have been conlangs (languages "made up" by identifiable individuals or groups of individuals in recent times – some of the entries used a conlang devised specifically for that song bordering on glossolalia), languages from outside the EBU area as well as "dead" classical languages such as Ancient Greek, Sanskrit or Classical Latin used for songs, their titles or parts of their lyrics.
Spoken languages and their first appearance Spoken languages are fully counted below when they are used in at least an entire verse or chorus of a song. First brief uses of a language and first uses of dialects are also noted.