961: Language Extinction (Bungi) Jul 27, 2017

The most common reason that a language goes extinct is that it is seen as more sensible to teach children a language that is spoken by a large group of people as opposed to a regional language; doing so gives a person, potentially, more options financially. Nevertheless, sometimes people also abandon languages because it is not what is taught in schools, or because they face discrimination for using it. With Bungi for instance—a creole language of mostly Scots English with influence from Orcadian Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Cree and Ojibwe—now thought to be extinct, researchers found that the speakers were embarrassed to use it. The accent was noticeably different from Standard English, and they faced discrimination from English speakers, but also they were not intelligible to Cree or Ojibwe speakers. Most of the time, people opted to teach their children Standard English due to those problems, as well as the fact that it was a minority language and was not taught in schools, so not very practical outside of certain communities.