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I don't know why, but the first time I came upon this marvelous site, in Mark's March 5, 2021 post, it didn't make much of an impression on me.  Maybe I was too busy to explore it at that time or was just not in the right mood.  Four days ago, however, when my old Peace Corps buddy, Bob Kambic, called it to my attention, Radio Garden just blew my mind away.  I kept exclaiming, "This is the most exciting, happiest day of my life!"

At the click of your mouse, you can listen to nearly 8,000 stations all around the earth.  Bob said, "It reminds me of the early days of the internet where you got unfiltered information free."

It reminded me of ham radio, for which I bought a pretty good set, but you had to have a well-tuned antenna, plus lots of patience and diligence to find interesting stations.

The link that Bob sent took me to Yellowknife, Canada, capital of the Northwest Territories, here.  From Yellowknife, I was off and skipping across the globe:  the hills of Nepal where I could listen to Nepali language and joyful songs, the Australian outback where I could hear Strine and aboriginal languages, to the Seychelles far from anywhere else (French, English, and Seychellois Creole), Weno in the Federated States of Micronesia (enchanting music!), Samoan on Pago Pago, English in Youngstown (57 miles from my home)…. Vilnius (Lithuania) keeps popping up, and it is very easy to reach my favorite station of all, 88.5 WXPN at the University of Pennsylvania.

BTW, in scanning the world, I often get stations that are not obviously marked, e.g., Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.  Those are especially welcome surprises.

It's also fun to swirl around the planet, from mountain heights to oceanic depths, accompanied by the sounds made by humans wherever they live.  Except…, there are few stations available where repressive governments rule.  Look at the difference between China (only a handful of stations [almost exclusively Mandarin] for 1.4 billion people) and India (hundreds of stations [in dozens of languages] for 1.4 billion people.

That oceanic blue globe with green and brown landscape whose surface is dotted with electric green circles suspended in cyan space is for me a Radio Paradise:

From Middle English paradis, paradise, paradys, from Late Old English paradīs, borrowed from Old French paradis, from Latin paradīsus, from Ancient Greek παράδεισος (parádeisos), ultimately from Proto-Iranian *paridayjah. From *pari- (“around”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *pari-, from Proto-Indo-European *per-, + *dáyjah (“wall”), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *dʰáyȷ́ʰas, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeyǵʰ- (“to knead, form”).

Doublet of parvis. Displaced Old English neorxnawang.

i.e., a garden, cf. Garden of Eden

(Wiktionary here and here)

Rapturous reception!

Selected readings

• "Radio Garden" (3/4/21)
• "Radio Garden" (Wikipedia)
• "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22) — includes the description and identification of the signature WXPN guitar chords

August 3, 2025 @ 6:02 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Communication, Language and geography, Language and music, Language and politics, Language and the media, Language and travel

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