Some quick observations following the latest row about 'political voting' at Saturday's Eurovision Song Contest:
- Ireland is the 30th-largest economy in the world, yet it is the UK's 4th-largest export market;
- Australia is twice as far away as Japan is from the UK, yet it receives more than four times the number of British visitors each year;
- French is the 15th most commonly-spoken native language in the world, yet it accounts for 60% of all UK GCSE entries for modern foreign languages.
What's our point? Simply that there are many examples of people sticking to 'cultural comfort zones', whether it be in business, tourism, education — or song contest voting patterns.
Here at Language is Everything, of course, we're all for 'breaking out' of cultural comfort zones, which leads us to this question: given that the top five countries at this year's Eurovision (and many others, including France) sang in English, why is it difficult (almost impossible, in fact) to imagine a UK entrant singing in a foreign language?
Meanwhile, changing the subject: the answer to our quiz last week (see our posting for 20th May) is that Ewe, Malayalam and Mam are all palindromes (words that read the same backwards as they do forwards). Many congratulations to Ray Gaston, who was the first person to send in the correct answer.