Slovenia to announce their EMA participants on Friday!

A few months back, we confirmed that Slovenia will be present at Eurovision 2018, and their upcoming selection would be inspired by the use of national language by this year’s Eurovision winning song by Salvador Sobral. The nation will once again be using EMA as their selection method but with a few rule tweaks which will promote the use of national language.

The Slovenian broadcaster RTVSLO received a total of 108 submissions, and from these submissions, the broadcaster selected just 16 acts which will perform in the semi-final to take place in February 2018. From these 16 acts, only 8 will be chosen to perform in the final which will also be in February. These 8 acts will be chosen by jury and televoters, each choosing 4 acts. The winning act will be selected through a mixture of jury and televoters.

This year the acts will be required to sing in Slovene or another minority language of Slovenia. This means we could be seeing songs in not only Slovene, but also Croatian, German, Hungarian, Italian, Romani and Serbian. We don’t yet know if this will carry on to Eurovision, where the winning song will remain in this language or whether they will transform the song into an English version.

Slovenia first made their debut at Eurovision in 1993, and due to the language rule at the time, their entries were all in Slovene until 1999 where the restriction was removed. Since then, six entries have been completely in Slovene, and two have been in part Slovene. Out of these entries, only two have been performed in the final, and one of those, the 2002 was by default do to there being no semi-finals. The other was in 2007 where Alenka Gotar performed the song Cvet z juga.

Stay tuned for more news regarding the Slovenian participants! For now, watch their 2017 performance here: