I usually do not give a fuck about the Eurovision but this year is a bit special for me as it is my language and culture who will represent France, so I have some thoughts about it and need to get them out.
First if you don’t know anything about this, the “French” song that will be at Eurovision is called Fulenn and was made by Alvan & Ahez. Alvan is a Breton electro musician. Ahez is a band of three Breton women who met in Diwan, which are immersion schools teaching the Breton language, and learnt kan ha diskan, Brittany’s traditional way of singing, from Louise Ebrel, an absolute icon of traditional Breton music.
The song is entirely in Breton and inspired by a Breton legend, the legend of Katell Gollet.
By the way Breton is a Celtic language of the Brythonic branch (with Welsh and Cornish, the other branch being the Goidelic one, with Irish, Scottish and Manx). Stats say it’s spoken by about 200K people nowadays, it is considered endangered. It’s spoken in Brittany, a western region of France.
Now I kind of want to point out the irony of it all… Diwan schools, where the members of this band met, are technically illegal in France. They exist, but they are in a very precarious position following the Constitutional Council’s decision of two years ago that officially ruled immersion schools as “against the French constitution”. The 2nd article of the French constition states that The Language of the Republic is French. France has quite the history of being absolutely terrible to the non-French languages spoken on its territory, hell it’s pretty terrible even to any Romance/French language that isn’t the standard (as regularly shown by the rampant glottophobia in our medias).
So France is going to be represented by a song born of something France is constitutionally against. I’m kind of amazed by the audacity.
To be fair, it’s not the first time France sent a Breton song to the eurovision, the other time was in 1996 with trad artist Dan ar Braz (check him out!).
So that’s for the fun political bits.
If you’re curious about the legend of Katell Gollet, here it is: Katell Gollet was a beautiful young woman whose only love was dancing. Her uncle wanted her to marry so she said ok, I will marry any man who can keep up with me and dance with me for 12 hours straight.
Many men tried, they all died of exhaustion.
Katell’s uncle was horrified and locked her up in a tower but she escaped and went to another party to dance again. Her dance partner died of exhaustion too, then the musicians died of exhaustion too, but she still didn’t want to stop, so she invoked musicians from the depths of hell to keep playing for her, and the Devil himself came to dance with her. The Devil and her then went through the gates of hell still dancing.
Of course originally it’s supposed to mean “Be a good girl, settle down for a man and marry, if you like dancing and having fun too much you’ll go to hell” because Brittany was catholic as fuck for a long time (hello Irish cousins). Personally I see a woman who didn’t want to settle down for anyone who couldn’t keep up with her and I dig that energy.
I highly encourage you to go check the song out, there are many videos of it with English translations on youtube. I think it’s a bop, personally, it’s a fun mix of electro and traditional singing. The lyrics are beautiful too!
Fun little language fact: Fulenn is a very versatile word, in the song it means “spark”, as in a spark of fire (which sometimes is written “Fulenn tan”), but in other contexts like “Fulenn erc’h” it means snowflake, and “Fulenn aour” is a gold chunk.
Fulenn is also a collective noun, which means that its default form “Ful” is plural, and you have to add a suffix to it (-enn) to make it singular. Ful= sparks. Fulenn= spark. This is of course because you rarely talk about a single spark, a single snowflake, those usually come in groups. Other collective nouns are usually cattle related, but my favourite one has to be “Krampouezh/enn”. It means crepe, and it’s a collective noun because whomst the fuck would only eat one crepe, am I right?
Anyway, I’m super happy about this song, about the visibility, about the lovely singing of those Breton-speaking women. Nothing would make me happier than this song winning the eurovision, forcing France to organise the eurovision (and as we all know, no country actually wants that) next year.
