Mani
[aka Bullom So, Northern Bullom, Bolom]Classification: Niger-Congo
·severely endangered
Classification: Niger-Congo
·severely endangered
Bullom So, Northern Bullom, Bolom, Bulem, Bullun, Bullin, Mmani, Mandingi, Mandenyi |
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Niger-Congo, Atlantic-Congo, Mel |
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ISO 639-3 |
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Information from: “A Grammar of Mani” . G. Tucker Childs (2011) Mouton de Gruyter
"In Sierra Leone the language is decidedly more vital than in Guinea."
"Spoken by only a few hundred people in only a limited number of contexts, if at all... the language is in the last throes of language death. The relatively few speakers had limited proficiency in the language... the language of enquiry, for the most part, was Soso, the language the Mani people had shifted to. When it was not Soso, it was French, the language of schools, the government, and the former colonial power. Few speakers were fluent speakers of French... On the Guinea side we found only a few elderly people scattered in many towns, [but] in Moribaya and especially on the island of Tangbaya we found a much more vital Mani culture including several Mani dance troupes and children who actually grew up speaking the language."
Temne
Soso
French
"Revitalization at the institutional level in Guinea seems unlikely... On the Sierra Leone side there exists a concerted effort to preserve the indigenous languages through what is called the 'National Linguistic Program', a project devoted to developing indigenous languages... In Kigbali (Guinea), the Mani have been denied representation in the local cultural society because of their minority status... Nonetheless, the Mani of Kigbali were flattered by the attention being paid to them and their language... there is some deep-seated and even fierce attachment to the language."
"...straddling the border on the coastal plain of Sierra Leone and Guinea. No villages in Guinea can be found in which Mani is the dominant language, although distinct sections and sometimes entire towns are ethnically Mani. In Sierra Leone, however, Mani remains a sometimes daily language in a small collection of geographically close villages around Moribaya in Kambia District."
Information from: “Language Endangerment in West Africa: Its Victims and Causes” . G. Tucker Childs (2006)
"Seriously threatened and doomed to extinction in the near future."
"One town chief on the Isle of Kabak even called speaking to the ancestors in Mani ‘speaking to the devil’ [...] domains for the use of Mani have disappeared, but the battering of the language is even more intense as children mock their playmates if they speak Mani, even on the Sierra Leone side of the border."
Information from: “NSF Award Abstract: Video-documenting the dying language Mani in Sierra Leone” . George Childs (2011)
"Since the few hundred remaining speakers are elderly and widely scattered, the language seems destined to die. As part of an earlier documentation project, however, it was discovered that on a remote island in Sierra Leone, children still grow up speaking the language. These children won a special Mani cultural competition in 2009 demonstrating the traditional arts of singing, dancing, and story-telling, and were provided with the first Mani books."
Information from: “Endangered Languages in West Africa” (140-162 ch. 7) . Roger Blench (2007) , Matthias Brenzinger · Mouton de Gruyter
6800
Temne
Information from: “Documenting the moribund language Mmani, a Southern Atlantic language of Niger-Congo” . Tucker Childs (2004)
"The few fluent speakers are all over fifty years old, and there are no monolingual Mmani speakers."