BBC URDU

The following audience estimates are from research conducted in 2004 by independent market research agencies on behalf of the BBC :

English — 39 million
Hindi — 16.1 million News in Hindi from the BBC World Service
Urdu — 10.4 million
Arabic — 12.4 million.
In Africa and the Middle East the service broadcasts to 66 million listeners, of which 18.7 million are in English.

Besides English, the BBC World Service currently broadcasts in Albanian, Arabic, Azeri, Bengali, Burmese, Caribbean English, Cantonese, French, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda/Kirundi, Kyrgyz, Macedonian, Mandarin, Nepali, Pashto, Persian, Portuguese for Africa and Brazil, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Tamil, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.

The German broadcasts were stopped in March 1999 after 60 years, as research showed that the majority of German listeners tuned into the English version. Broadcasts in Dutch, Finnish, French for Europe, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese and Malay were stopped for similar reasons.

On 25 October 2005 it was announced that the Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Kazakh, Polish, Slovak, Slovene and Thai language radio services would end by March 2006 in order to finance the launch of an Arabic language TV news channel in 2007.