Extending coverage in vernacular language

In many countries, the state broadcaster’s output is largely in the official language of the country, which tends to be the language of the elite. So for example in North Africa, much of the output is in French whereas a larger part of the audience would be comfortable in Arabic. However, in Sub-Saharan Africa, the issue is one where each country is a patchwork quilt of languages, not all of which appear in the broadcasting output, public or private. The rise of vernacular radio stations in liberalised markets has done much to address these needs but talk/music radio formats provide a fairly limited diet of content.

In Mauritius, the Government and the state broadcaster MBC will be offering new channels that are in several of the languages spoken on the island. The languages chosen for transmission are tamil, télégou, urdu, marathi and mandarin.