African Radio and Minority Languages: Participation and Representation

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.

Limukani Mathe (PhD) is a Research Fellow and Lecturer at North-West University in South Africa. Prior to that he was Lecturer and Research Fellow at the University of Johannesburg and Guest Lecturer at the University of Fort Hare. His research interests are in media representation with particular focus on digital culture, journalism practices and indigenous text in the Global South. Mathe has edited books, contributed book chapters and also published in high impact journals. His recent edited book ＂Reconceptualising Multilingualism on African Radio: Language and Identity＂ reflects on the evolving identities and lingua in Africa and radio as a mirror of such realities.