Since the introduction of radio as a device at home, authority has worked – through radio broadcasting and the governing of radio waves – on creating molds and formats that convey its ideology and vision for the nation and society at its core: the family.

 

Throughout radio programs, this whole package reaches the citizen/ listener in order to learn and know the news, but also as he measures his life, actions and thoughts against the members of an imagined community who are also listening to the radio. The pillar upon which stands the relationship between the authority and the individual is language. Post-independence countries (including Egypt and Algeria) have worked to export - each on their side - a white dialect with which to address their citizens. Dialects of regions and districts away from the capital are obscured to leave a place for the white metropolitan dialect, which prevails over everything and teaches the new citizens how they are to speak. Of course there are no specific decrees telling radio presenters and actors how to speak, but the producers, writers of radio soap operas, and star presenters all revolve in one circuit that makes the white dialect a ‘grinder’ or mill where dialects and differences enter only to emerge similar and simplified. The white dialect leaves for rural and distant accents only narrow spaces within the context of satirical plays, sketches, jokes and characters that comedians mimic. Thus the rural dialect becomes stigmatized and folkloric, and is mentioned only for it and its speakers to be ridiculed; as what happened in Algeria with the dialects of Jijel, Medea and Moaskar, and in Egypt with the dialects of Upper Egypt rural areas.