Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 11, 2026

Busuu language

Busuu is an unclassified Southern Bantoid language of Cameroon. According to Ethnologue it is extinct. As of 2005, there were three speakers of the language. Busuu is an endangered language.

Last revised
Jun 11, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
233 w
Citations
3
Source
Busuu
Native toCameroon
RegionNorth West Province, Menchum Division, Furu-Awa Subdivision, Furu-Awa and Furu-Nangwa villages.
ExtinctLate 2000s1
Language codes
ISO 639-3bju
Glottologbusu1244
ELPBusuu

Busuu is an unclassified Southern Bantoid language of Cameroon. According to Ethnologue it is extinct. As of 2005, there were three speakers of the language.2 Busuu is an endangered language.

Classification

In the Furu-Awa Subdivision in northern Cameroon bordering to 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%.3

See also

See also

  • Busuu (an online network named after the Busuu language)
Notes

Notes

  1. Busuu at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) Closed access icon
  2. Ltd, Hymns Ancient & Modern (March 2005). ThirdWay. Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd. p. 33. Retrieved 1 January 2011.
  3. 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 Archived 2012-02-18 at the Wayback Machine
External links