Did you know where the name of our website busuu.com comes from?
Busuu is actually a language from Cameroon in Africa, spoken by only 8 people!
It was first “discovered” by the French professor of linguistics Roland Breton in the year 1986. According to his and more recent research, the language, with the ISO 639 identifier “bju“, belongs to the Niger-Congo language family or in detail, the so called unclassified Southern Bantoid language family.
The UNESCO included the language Busuu within their highly interesting Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There, the language is classified as “critically endangered“. Below you can see exactly the area, where the language is supposed to be spoken by those 8 people. Just click on the picture and you can find out more about the region which is close to the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.
Who are those 8 people that still speak Busuu? How do they look like? Do they know about busuu.com? 😉 Maybe one day, we will find out…
The UNESCO estimates that there are around 3,000 endangered languages world-wide. This is nearly half of the 6,500 languages spoken around the globe. Since 1950, already 230 languages extinct!
We from busuu.com hope that we can also contribute to preserve some of those endangered languages. Do you remember our campaign to rescue the Silbo Gomero, the nearly extinct whistled language from the Gomera Islands in Spain?
Shortly after the launch of our video, for which we received a Silver Lion in the International Marketing Festival in Cannes, the Silbo Gomero was declared Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity!
We are absolutely convinced that if busuu.com can be used to learn “large languages” such as English or Spanish, our platform could also serve to preserve endangered languages.
So maybe one day, we will make our contribution that you can learn Busuu on busuu.com! 🙂
