Bungee (language)
| Bungee | ||
|---|---|---|
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Spoken in |
Canada (Province of Manitoba ) | |
| speaker | practically extinct | |
| Linguistic classification |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -2 |
cpe |
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Bungee , also called Bungi (e) or Bungay , but also Red River Dialect , is / was a language used by Canadian Métis in the province of Manitoba . In contrast to the Métis with French ancestors who developed Michif , the speakers of the bungee descended from Scottish immigrants and Cree Indians. The language evolved from an English-based pidgin originally spoken by fur and fur traders . For a long time, the Cree language was Manitoba's lingua franca even among settlers , but in the 19th century it was permeated by the languages of the Europeans. Bungee is therefore a mixed language based on English , with strong colouration of the Cree dialects. Since the demographics of the settlers were also inhomogeneous, extensive vocabulary from Scottish Gaelic and Scots penetrated the bungee.
The language was a purely functional communication option among residents of the Red River of the North . After the colonial way of life had died out after around 1900, the degree of creolization also gradually receded. Today, typical bungee language patterns and the original articulation and idioms are still common in many places, but the language has adapted so closely to Canadian English that one has to speak of a mesolect . Nevertheless, there are still a few thousand, mostly older speakers, whose English still shows a high proportion of Creolisms.
The Métis with British ancestry were called Countryborn and, unlike the Francophone Métis, they were not Catholic , but Anglican or Presbyterian . The first Prime Minister of Manitoba, John Norquay (1841 to 1889, in office from 1878 to 1887) was an Anglo-Métis.
The derivation of the name of the language is controversial. Either “bungee” is derived from the Anishina word “bangii”, or from the Cree word “pahkl”, which means “a little”.