Catalan pop? Corsican rock? It's Europe's other song contest

TONDER (Denmark) - Folk musician Billy Fumey strode onstage on the night of May 13 in this quaint, rural market town and launched into an intense love song in the endangered language of Franco-Provencal.

As he belted out a lyrical description of hair blowing in the wind - "Kma tsekion de tet frissons da l'oura ledzira" - few in the 500-strong audience had any idea what he was singing about, but it did not seem to matter.

When the yodelling-heavy track came to an end, the crowd clapped wildly anyway.

A few moments later, Carolina Rubirosa, a Spanish rock musician who sings in Galician, got a similar reaction.

As did Jimi Henndreck, a psychedelic rock band from Italy who sang a raucous number in South Tyrolean, a German dialect.

So, too, did Inga-Maret Gaup-Juuso, an electronic artist singing in a language of the Sami Indigenous people of Northern Europe.

All were taking part in Liet International, a European song contest for regional and minority languages.

Rubirosa told the crowd in English after finishing her song: "This is a dream to be here today, with my language, outside my country."

Minority languages are vital, she added. "We don't have to let them die."

About 200 million people tuned into the Eurovision Song Contest last Saturday to hear music from around the continent.

The 25 pop stars in the final included those performing in Italian, Spanish and Ukrainian.

Yet the millions of people in Europe who speak one of its many regional and minority languages are unlikely to find themselves represented on the Eurovision stage, let alone in their country's pop charts.

Since 2002, Liet International has been offering a platform to musicians from these communities - although it is a world away from the spectacle of a Eurovision final.

Last Friday's event occurred in the Culture House, a small hall next to a care facility for older adults in Tonder, which is in a German-speaking region of Denmark.

The event, live-streamed on the contest's YouTube page, attracted just 944 views, although a recording will soon be broadcast on television in the Netherlands.

Ms Tjallien Kalsbeek, one of the competition's organisers, said Liet International had its roots in a contest started by a Dutch television station in the 1990s.

That 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 contest was a hit, Ms Kalsbeek said, and it became an annual event.

For its 10th anniversary, a special edition that featured acts in other minority languages, including Basque, Occitan and Welsh, was held. This was the first Liet International; the one on May 13 was the 13th edition.

The status of Europe's minority languages varies wildly. Some, including Catalan, are spoken by millions of people, yet others, including North Frisian, native to northern Germany, have just a few thousand speakers left and are at risk of extinction, according to Unesco.

Professor Elin Jones, who studies language diversity at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, said regional languages such as Welsh - ones protected by national governments and taught in schools - were thriving.

But in countries including France, Greece and Russia, minority languages were more at risk, because children are usually educated only in the national language.

Several of the people participating in Liet International came from areas where speaking a minority language could be seen as a political act, including Corsica, the Mediterranean island where, this year, clashes broke out after a Corsican activist was beaten up in a French jail.

On Friday, Doria Ousset, a Corsican singer with a six-piece band, sung an epic rock lament for a 17th-century Corsican soldier facing execution by French forces. She said: "The French state does not want us to know our history, so we have to sing it."

The contest came down to a three-horse race between Ousset; Yourdaughters, two sisters from north Germany's Danish-speaking minority who sang a dreamy R&B track; and Rubirosa, the Galician songwriter.

When Ousset was eventually announced as the winner, she collapsed into her bandmates' arms in shock, then rushed to the front of the stage waving Corsica's flag.

"How do you feel?" asked one of the hosts in English.

Ousset replied in Corsican with a lengthy, tearful, speech. Very few people in the audience understood a word she said. But they clapped and cheered anyway.