African Radio and Minority Languages

Within Africa, radio provides an important platform for accommodating diverse linguistic groups and enabling speakers to express themselves in their own local languages. This book investigates how radio broadcasting across the continent provides a platform for cultural participation and the representation of minority language speakers in a contested public sphere.

In African media, a fierce contest wages for representation and participation, in which majority languages often emerge at the exclusion of minority ethnolinguistic groups. This book considers the important role that radio can play in broadcasting in minority languages. Drawing on in-depth original analysis, ethnographic observation and interviews with minority language radio hosts and guests from across South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Malawi, Namibia, Mozambique, Lesotho and Kenya, this book considers to what extent African radio is accommodative of minority languages and what the challenges and prospects are for this. Ultimately, the book argues that radio’s three-tier system of broadcasting through analogue and digital radio leaves the medium of radio particularly well placed to provide equal access for ethnolinguistic groups in Africa.

This ambitious and broad-ranging study will be an essential read for scholars and students of media studies and sociolinguistics in Africa.