Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) reviews its radio services every five years.
Since last year public consultation with Australian multicultural communities from November to December 2016, the publication of Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data and over 600 submissions from individual and Australian community organizations to SBS audience feedback, along with some factors and some final selection criteria, SBS has decided to create seven new radio services program in Telugu, Karen, Tibetan, Hakha Chin, Rohingya, Mongolian and Kirundi (Rundi) while discontinue twelves languages i.e Kannada, Tongan, Norwegian, Cook Island Maori, Fijian, Swedish, English African Program, Lithuanian, Malay, Latvian, Danish. The changes come into effect on November 20th 2017.
There are many factors which SBS use to decide which program to be maintained or will no longer services, SBS consider, if that community of particular languages are in high need for instance their recent arrival, ages, household income, level of English proficiency, size of that communities either one thousands or over 25,000 pluas some of the factors if they have been vilified, discriminated against because of their race, ethnic origin, descent, color or national and immediate need whether their communities has increases or decreasing or mix with mainstream Australian communities.
According to ABS 2016 Census data, roughly 5 million (4.87 million) Australian speak a language other than English at home.
The director of Audio and Language Content at SBS, Mandi Wicks said that it is very excited to introduce 7 new languages to its radio services while it is unfortunate that it also discontinue 12 languages in order to ensure that its services meet the neeg of changing multicultural society as it continually changes.
Federation of Ethnic Community's Council of Australia chairman Joe Cuputo said that it is important to make sure that SBS reflect multicultural Australia as it changes.
Broadcasting hour are also changed for some of the radio services i.e. Turkish program and Croatian languages will be reduced from five hours to 4 hours per week, while German will be reduce from seven to five hours a week as well as Hungarian, Bosnian and Albanian will also be reduced to one hour a week. Some languages broadcasting time will also affect namely Dari, Dinka, Khmer, Maltese, Nepali, Pashto and Tigrinya programs.
However, there is nothing change for SBS Hmong Program and it is still broadcasted on Thursday 6pm AEST and on Sunday 11 am AEST (Australian Eastern Standard Time).
Therefore, SBS Radio is the world most linguistically diverse publich broadcaster, producing content in 68 different languages.
Listion to more news in Hmong and in English from the following websites:
Listening to one hour program in Hmong at:
Download podcasts in Hmong or in English at:
www.sbs.com.au/podcasts/yourlanguage/hmong
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