Estonia Announces Language Beauty Contest

On the occasion of its 90th birthday, Estonia is planning a beauty contest for languages to crown the prettiest dialect of them all.

No girls in swimsuits mouthing breathless French phrases into a microphone. Instead the plan is to have kids from around the world send in a voice recording in their native language consisting of a maximum of seven words.

The idea for the contest arose out of an Estonian story that the country’s language was once crowned the second most beautiful language in the world after Italian. The winning phrase then was “soida tasa ule silla” which means “go slowly over the bridge”. Now on their country’s anniversary, Estonians want to check in to see how their language ranks against the rest of the world’s dialects.

Estonians have traditionally been fond of their linguistic heritage. The country has fiercely opposed any kind of foreign rule for fear of their language being diluted and linguistic issues are an important part of government policy. The language itself – a member of the Finno-Ugric group of languages – and an official language of the European Union is spoken by barely 1.1 million people worldwide.