BBC shuts down Serbian language service

The BBC World Service said today it would close five of its language services and cut 650 jobs - one quarter of World Service staff of 2,000, as it seeks to make deep savings.

The Albanian, Macedonian, Portuguese for Africa and Serbian languages services as well as the English for the Caribbean regional service will all be shut down.

The cuts will also spell the end of radio programmes in seven languages including Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese, although multimedia coverage of the languages will continue.

BBC Global News Director Peter Horrocks said the scale of the 16 percent savings target that the World Service must make as part of widespread government cuts "is such that we couldn't cope with this by efficiencies alone."