The BBC is present in 43 languages. Incredible I would say. What is more incredible are the naguages that are missing, more than the languages that are present. In particular for Europe we have:
Russian, Uckrainian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Slovak, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, Greek, and Turkish.
Impressive, isn’t it? And yet don’t you feel that we are missing something? I mean… what about French, German, Spanish, and Italian? Well, French is there. Just not in the European list but in the African one. As well as Portuguese and Spanish (which is called Mundo just to make things more interesting, but the url recites ‘/spanish/’) for Latin America. But there is not just a difference of language but of focus. So, for example, there are two edition in Portugese: Portuguese (focused on South America) Portugueseafrica (focused on Africa).
Still French, German, Spanish, and Italian are missing as BBC pages focused on Europe, while German and Italian are just missing, fullstop (Japanese is also missing from the Asia languages, but I am sure it is a coincidence!).
The question remains, why is it so? And I suppose that from a strictly economical point of view it makes sense for BBC to invest in opening up to nations where they will not find a big competition with local media. Also the people who would
choose BBC in those countries are generally people from a highly educated background that surf often on the Internet. In short people who have little problems in reading their news in English.
Yet it would bve so good to have this other possible source of news for media-controlled-Italy. In the meantime Euronews offers news in 7 european languages. A message that it might seem a small niche for the BBC but the request for european news in Italian, German, Spanish, and French is there.
No related posts.
I could not believe that there was no news in German. As a teacher I was hoping to use it for my pupils. It is very annoying having it in every other language under the sun.
Actually, the BBC World Service is down to 33 language services in 32 languages (it kept the 2 separate Portuguese services). It recently dropped Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, and Thai.
My guess is that you’re right, not having services for richer nations’ languages (German, Japanese, etc.) makes more economic sense for the BBC. This article about the cut from 43 to 33:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4550102.stm
doesn’t give the reason but hints that it’s because they figure Central/Eastern Europe doesn’t need it anymore or something (and says even less about why they cut the Kazakh and Thai services).
This article about the BBC’s World Service in Europe:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4375652.stm
says that they did have a German service but cut it in 1999 and also used to have them in Dutch, Finnish, French for Europe, Italian, and Spanish for Europe – and in Hebrew, Japanese, and Malay. The Albanian service was dropped in 1967 and added again in 1993, so maybe some others could be restarted too?
Actually, according to the article you linked, it seemed that the reason is to make space for an arabic TV channel. This seems to make sense considering that:
Thanks for the follow up, Hsifeng, where are you from?
You’re welcome.
I’m an American, and I tried to learn Spanish but I’m really bad at foreign languages. 
Meanwhile, have you seen the Radio Netherlands site ( http://www.rnw.nl/ )? It reminds me of the BBC World Service and has services in Dutch for the Netherlands, Dutch for the Antilles and Aruba, Dutch for Suriname, Arabic, English, Indonesian, Portuguese, and Spanish. There’s also a French for Africa site which they list in “other RN sites” instead of “other languages” for some reason.
My name is Pili and I’m a Spanish girl. I’m 20 years old and I’m studing Fine Arts at the University of Salamanca. I’d like to be a painter. I like to go to “tapear” (to a Spanish bar, you know) go to some parties, but specially I like to travel around the world. Last year I studied in USA, when I met my friend Lucy. She is studing Spanish there. I write a spoken diary for her and for all of you. You can visit me every week in http://www.dpili.com and download a free podcast. ¡Learning Spanish is easy with me!
I recommend you to listen the first podcast to understand the diary.
http://www.dpili.com
see you!!!