BBC FOREIGN LANGUAGE BROADCASTS
Why World-Wide Coverage Is Necessary OME listeners have been wondering why certain broadcasts in foreign languages are carried on in the main Overseas Service of the BBC as well as in the European Service. To those who do not understand the languages concerned, it is disconcerting, of course, to have no alternative programme in English, but there
are good reasons for the arrangement, and these are given in an air-mail communication from the BBC: The war schedule of short-wave programmes from Great Britain is based broadly on the provision of a World Service (incorporating the Empire Service) and a European Service. These two main services coincide for certain bulletins in English and in foreign languages. Afrikaans, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish are the languages concerned. Of these Afrikaans and French are Empire languages-the mother-tongues of a large proportion of South Africans and Canadians respectively. Moreover, French is widely spoken in some Colonial territories-in Mauritius, for example-and in many other parts of the world outside the Empire. German and Italian fall into a rather different category. They are spoken by an appreciable number of citizens of the Empire, and they are, moreover, languages with wide currency in many other parts of the world. The object of the BBC’s Overseas Service in wartime being to secure world-wide ceverage, it is clearly desirable that the news in German and Italian should be included in the main service and not confined to Europe. Spanish and Portuguese take their place in the main programmes because they are the languages of South and Central America, as well as of Spain and Portugal, and of appreciable sections of the population of Portuguese possessions in Africa and in other parts of the world, such as Goa and Macao. The outbreak of war made it necessary, on technical grounds, to abandon the separate Latin-American programme gervice that started in July, but the BBC still has responsibility to its dual audience, and the principal languages are rightly represented.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 23, 1 December 1939, Page 55
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333BBC FOREIGN LANGUAGE BROADCASTS New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 23, 1 December 1939, Page 55
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