Busuu is an unclassified
Southern Bantoid language of
Cameroon
Cameroon, officially the Republic of Cameroon, is a country in Central Africa. It shares boundaries with Nigeria to the west and north, Chad to the northeast, the Central African Republic to the east, and Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and the R ...
. According to ''
Ethnologue
''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...
'' it is extinct. As of 2005 there were 3 speakers of the language.
Busuu is an
endangered language
An endangered language or moribund language is a language that is at risk of disappearing as its speakers die out or shift to speaking other languages. Language loss occurs when the language has no more native speakers and becomes a " dead langua ...
.
Classification
In the Furu-Awa Subdivision in northern Cameroon bordering to
Nigeria
Nigeria, officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a country in West Africa. It is situated between the Sahel to the north and the Gulf of Guinea in the Atlantic Ocean to the south. It covers an area of . With Demographics of Nigeria, ...
, three missions of ALCAM (Atlas Linguistique du Cameroun) between 1984 and 1986 investigated three non-
Jukunoid languages, among which
Bikya and
Bishuo are probably
Beboid, but Busuu has been unable to be classified. All of these languages were spoken only by a few older inhabitants of the five villages Furu-Awa, (Furu-)Nangwa (Busuu-speaking), (Furu-)Turuwa, (Furu-)Sambari (Bishuo-speaking) and Furubana (Bikya-speaking). Lexical analysis has shown that while Bishuo has 24% lexical similarity with neighbouring Beboid languages,
Nsaa and
Nooni and Bikya have 16% resp. 17% similarity with them, and Busuu has just 8% resp. 7%.
[Breton, Roland: ''Is there a Furu language group? An investigation on the Cameroon-Nigeria border'' in ''Journal of West African Languages'' Vol. 23, Number 2, http://www.journalofwestafricanlanguages.org/Volume23.aspx ]
See also
*
Busuu
Busuu is a second-language acquisition, language learning platform on web, iOS and Android that allows users to interact with native speakers. In 2021, Chegg acquired Busuu for $436 million.
History
Busuu was founded in May 2008 by Bernhard N ...
(an online network named after the Busuu language)
External links
Multimedia Site about Busuu with a song sung in this language
Notes
Furu languages
Endangered Niger–Congo languages
Endangered languages of Africa
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