Television audience in European Minority Languages: Reality, demographic profile, and correlation

This article investigates the audiences of seven television stations of public ownership and general content and reach, broadcasting in Basque, Catalan, Frisian, Galician, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh languages. The study (2021-2022) focuses on the audiences' quantitative dimensions and demographic profile and their correlation with the concept of mutual linguistic intelligibility, defined as the degree of understanding between minority and majority languages. A worthy and original finding reveals that those channels with a high degree of mutual linguistic intelligibility get a notably higher share (10-15%) than those with a very low degree of mutual intelligibility (1-3% share). The comparison of the audience metrics of minority-language televisions with those of majority-language public channels discloses challenging results. Regarding demographic profiles, there are evident audience differences among the seven televisions. At the European level, women represent 52.8%, and on the age variable, 65% of the audience is over 55.