Beur FM streams French, Arabic and Berber-language talk and music live from Paris, built to serve France's Algerian, Moroccan and Tunisian communities. Press play on Radio Shuffle and it streams instantly, free, with no account or app download required.
Named after a word that reversed its own syllables
Beur FM takes its name from "beur," a piece of verlan slang that reverses the syllables of "arabe," a naming choice that put the station's identity directly into its call letters. Algerian-French physician and writer Nacer Kettane founded the station in Paris, launching it as Radio Beur around 1981 before it secured a licensed frequency roughly eight years later, according to a history of the station. Kettane was already a recognized figure in the beur movement of the 1980s and 1990s, having launched the monthly magazine Sans Frontière before turning to radio.
A deliberately mixed-language signal
From the start, Beur FM built its schedule around a specific language balance: roughly 60 percent French, 20 percent Arabic, including Maghrebi dialects, and 20 percent Berber, a split designed to serve a Maghrebi diaspora that itself speaks across all three. The station moved onto 106.7 MHz in Paris in 1992, a frequency it still broadcasts on today, and expanded nationally through the rest of the 1990s, eventually reaching close to twenty frequencies across France alongside a 24-hour schedule. It later joined Les Indés Radios, the consortium representing France's independent local and regional stations.
A sale that changed little about its mission
Kettane ran the station for more than three decades before selling his shares to industrialist Serge Dassault in July 2014, a transaction that shifted ownership without displacing the station's original community-focused format. Beur FM also expanded into television with Beur TV in 2003 and has backed a literary prize with TV5 Monde, extending its cultural footprint well beyond the FM dial.
Listen free on Radio Shuffle
Beur FM streams around the clock, and Radio Shuffle carries the feed live with nothing to install and no subscription required. Press play for a station built specifically to give France's Maghrebi communities a voice on the airwaves.