Studies in African Linguistics (Jun 2009)
What happens to class when a language dies
Abstract
This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), “Bullom So” in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc.) spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language.