2018 | The SWLing Post

(Source: The Mainichi via Kim Elliott)

HELSINKI (AP) — For nearly three decades, Finland’s YLE radio has broadcast a weekly news program in Latin to a small group of committed listeners around the globe.

With the audience numbering just 10,000 and people increasingly turning to the internet for content, Friday was meant to be the end of the road for “Nuntii Latini,” which means “news in Latin.” But don’t underestimate the passion of Latin aficionados — more than 3,000 of them wrote in from around the globe, some in fluent Latin, encouraging the station to save the program.

YLE leadership listened, agreeing to extend it until at least its 30th anniversary in 2019.

“Ne umquam desperaveris,” (loosely translated: “never give up,”) said co-announcer Reijo Pitkaranta, a docent and lecturer in Latin at the University of Helsinki.[…]

Click here to read the full article.

Click here to listen to Nuntii Latini.

Spread the radio love

Happy New Year SWLing Post community!

A few months ago, I published a post about Colin Anderton’s excellent Radio Moscow recordings from the late 1970s. Being a space flight enthusiast, all of Colin’s brief off-air recordings feature news from the 1977-1978 Soyuz 26 mission to the Salyut 6 space station.

Recently, I started posting Colin’s recordings on a schedule so that each recording is being published exactly 40 years from the original broadcast date. Check out the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive each day (or subscribe via iTunes) to listen to the recordings.

Below, I’ve embedded the recording from New Year’s Day 1978 where we learned that Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko toasted the New Year with fruit juice (for obvious reasons, champagne was not allowed on the station!).