Visualisation

Eurovision, every entry since 1956

Sixty-nine years of European pop in one stacked chart. Watch the languages of performance — French rules the early decades, English takes over after the rule change, the rule reverses, the rule reverses again.

Eurovision songs by performance language, 1956–present English French German Italian Dutch Spanish Other 1956 1964 1972 1980 1988 1996 2004 2012 2020 0 10 21 32 43
Languages of performance by year. From 1966 to 1973, countries had to sing in an official national language. From 1977 to 1998 the rule returned. Since 1999, anything goes — and almost everyone goes with English.

The Eurovision Song Contest is older than most modern European institutions. It started in 1956 with seven countries, in a Swiss theatre, and the rules were so informal that the voting records for the first edition have never been recovered. There's been a contest every year since (with the 2020 pandemic gap), and 52 countries have competed at least once. The contest's most powerful unstated rule has always been about language — and the chart above shows it.

The language rule keeps flipping

From the start, you could sing in any language you wanted. Then in 1966 the contest mandated that you sing in one of your country's official languages — partly to protect minority European tongues, partly because too many countries were noticing how well English songs travelled. In 1973 the rule was scrapped. In 1977 it came back. In 1999 it was scrapped again and hasn't returned. Look at the chart: the English-language sliver tells you exactly which rule was in effect.

What it takes to win

Through 2024, the most successful country is Ireland with 7 wins — though if you weight by entries-per-win, the picture changes considerably.

Most wins by country 0 1 3 5 7 Ireland Sweden Luxembourg Netherlands France United Kingdom Israel Switzerland Denmark Italy
Top ten countries by Eurovision wins.
CountryWins
Ireland7
Sweden7
Luxembourg5
Netherlands4
France4
United Kingdom4
Israel4
Switzerland3
Denmark3
Italy3

The shape of the data

Years contested68
Total entries1,758
Unique countries52 (some no longer exist as competing entities)
First winnerSwitzerland, 1956 (Lys Assia, "Refrain")
Lowest known viewing figures1956 (no televised voting, audience uncounted)
Peak audience2014 — 195 million viewers worldwide

Try it yourself

The dataset is on GitHub as a single 12 MB JSON — every year, every contestant, every song with language and ordering:

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/josago97/EurovisionDataset/main/dataset/eurovision.json

# Quick: how many entries sang in English in 2010?
jq '.[] | select(.year==2010) | .contestants | map(select(.language=="English")) | length' eurovision.json

Sources