Mamanwa language

Mamanwa
Native to	Philippines
Region	Agusan del Norte and Surigao provinces, Mindanao
Native speakers	unknown (5,200 cited 1990 census)[1]
Language family	Austronesian Malayo-Polynesian Philippine Central Philippine Mansakan Mamanwa
Writing system	Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	mmn
Glottolog	mama1275[2]

The Mamanwa language is a Central Philippine language spoken in the provinces of Agusan del Norte and Surigao in Mindanao, Philippines. It had about 5,000 speakers in 1990, mostly Mamanwa.

Mamanwa is a grammatically conservative language, retaining a three-way deictic distinction in its articles which elsewhere is only preserved in some of the Batanic languages.^[3]

Before the arrival of Mamanwa speakers in central Samar Island, there had been an earlier group of Negritos on the island (Lobel 2013:92). According to Lobel (2013), the Samar Agta may have switched to Waray-Waray or Northern Samarenyo, or even possibly Mamanwa.

Also, Francisco Combes, a Spanish friar, had observed the presence of Negritos in the Zamboanga Peninsula “in the Misamis strip” in 1645, although no linguistic data had ever been collected (Lobel 2013:93).

References

1. Mamanwa at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Mamanwa". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Ross, Malcolm (2005). "The Batanic languages in relation to the early history of the Malayo-Polynesian subgroup of Austronesian." Journal of Austronesian Studies 1/2:1-24.

• Lobel, Jason William. 2013. Philippine and North Bornean languages: issues in description, subgrouping, and reconstruction. Ph.D. dissertation. Manoa: University of Hawai'i at Manoa.