A Requiem for the Romanian Language on the Pop Charts

Andrew Kerr laments the increasing use of English by Romanian Pop Stars.

Over the last ten years Bucharest has undergone a startling amount of change. Communist-era cars, whose tinny honks once punctuated the air, have been replaced by a flood of baritone-voiced European imports. Whole blocks are being torn down as the city undergoes major renovation. The faces and voices of Africans and Asians have been added to the mix of people strolling down the sidewalks.

Romanian pop music has changed, also. This is hardly a revelation; music changes everywhere. But what troubles me is that the Romanian language itself seems to be dying off in the Romanian pop charts.

When I first started listening to Romanian pop music in late 2000, I was enchanted by the sounds of the Romanian language. Romanians pride themselves in their linguistic uniqueness; they are “Latins in a sea of Slavs” and speak a language whose cadences most closely resemble Italian. The language itself is musical, and thus lends itself well to song.

I heard Romanian a lot on the country’s ‘top 40’ radio stations in 2001. Romanian-language songs popped up every fifteen minutes or so and 100 per cent of Romanian acts sang in their own language.

But during my last visit to the country, in the autumn of 2008, it seemed that at least half of the Romanian artists featured on Kiss TV (a Romanian music video channel) sang in English. The data confirm the observation. For example, over the last six months only about 30 per cent of Romanian top 40 songs (songs written and performed by Romanian musicians) used the Romanian language.

In 2002, a group called Akcent sang Romanian-language songs, but by 2008 they were largely sticking to English. In 2003 Activ sang in their native tongue, but ever since enjoying international success with a 2005 English-language cover of one of their Romanian hits, English has dominated their lyrics. A talented pop group called Hi-Q, which released a string of catchy chart successes over the span of a decade, offered their first English-language song in 2009.

One of the most internationally successful Romanian groups is Morandi; they've been singing their lyrics in English for at least two years. And perhaps feeling left out from all this Englishness, Crush, featuring Alexandra Ungureanu called their 2008 pop-trance hit "Hello," a title plucked from the only English-language word to appear in the lyrics.

Perhaps most symbolically, the biggest hit sung in the Romanian language is Moldovan pop group O-zone's "Dragostea din tei," a song better known in the United States as the "Numa Numa Song" after a portly kid's lip-sync to it, became a viral video. In 2008, former O-zone singer Dan Bălan began a new Europop project called Crazy Loop. You can guess what language he sings in now.

From 2002 until 2008 there were usually between 10 and 15 Romanian-language songs on the pop charts. For the last year the number has hovered around 4 or 5. And it's not just the pop stars that are making the switch to English; even the younger, underground Romanian rock groups are embracing it. They have left the Romanian language to older groups like Holograf and Iris—the groups your Romanian dad listens to.

By contrast, over a quarter of the songs on a recent French top 40 pop chart featured French lyrics. The ratio is similar for German-language songs on the German charts and Dutch-language on the Dutch charts. Recently, I wondered if larger countries are more likely than smaller ones to stick to their own language, since they'd theoretically have a larger market of music consumers to tap into. My research was, unfortunately, fairly inconclusive - comparing different countries' pop charts introduces a difficult ‘apples vs. oranges’ situation. But there is a hint of a correlation.

The cavalry charge to English was led by Romanian house music. In 2007 Romanian dance producers DJ Sava and Tom Boxer began to offer English-language pop songs. Today the charts are heavily dominated by the output, collaborations, and remixes of dance music producers like DJ Andi and David DeeJjay, who have contributed to the development of an icy and uniquely Romanian flavour of dance music that nowadays always boasts English lyrics.

House typically samples a line or two and repeats that line ad nauseum, which makes it a logical place to get one's feet wet with a foreign language. Reaction to these English-language efforts in Romania is mixed; David Deejay's "Sexy Thing," the bulk of which consists of an endlessly looped, "Somebody told you how much I love you, how much I love you, how much I love you," irritated a Romanian friend so much that she asked me, "What the f*** does that even mean?" But the songs continue to chart.

Artists who drop Romanian for English have sound reasoning behind their decision. English’s status as a popular second language, means their English-language warblings increases the likelihood that their songs will appear on charts in other countries, and that adds up to more lei. Inna's English-language offering "Hot" is enjoying broad European success right now; English stands a better chance than Romanian of being blasted out in a Kiev disco.

Language is tied up in politics and European nations have fought on and off for centuries, and the language of one's "enemy" is by itself enough to make some people bristle. To sing even a banality like "I love you, you love me" in the Albanian language becomes a political act when one considers how a Serbian might react to the linguistic (or perceived jingoistic) tones. In 2009 English is Europe's safest, most neutral alternative.

But I greet the death of a language on a country’s pop charts with the same sadness I experience over the loss of a beautiful species of bird. It’s probable that the Romanian–language lyrics from years past were as awful as the English ones we typically hear in the United States, but lyricists will always be able to do cleverer things in a language with which they are familiar, and singers will always be more dexterous singing in their native tongue. Today, a bubbly spring of Romanian words has been drowned in
"Somebody told you how much I love you, how much I love you, how much I love you.”

Did a westward-looking Manifest Destiny of pop, driven by a combination of internet connectivity in the 1990s and EU accession in January 2007 contribute to the recent decline of Romanian on the Romanian pop charts?

Moreover, did my own trips to Romania, in some small way, contribute to a decline in the use of a language that had once so enamoured me in those pop tunes from a decade ago? To put it another way, was I a well-meaning voyager who unwittingly introduced some fatal disease to another population? Did I help kill Romanian on the top 40 charts?

The author is a Europop music DJ. He is currently taking Romanian-language lessons in Atlanta. His personal website on European dance music can be found at www.kingpigeon.com