Mamanwa language
The Mamanwa language is a Central Philippine language spoken by the Mamanwa people. It is spoken in the provinces of Agusan del Norte and Surigao del Norte in the Lake Mainit area of Mindanao, Philippines. It had about 5,000 speakers in 1990.
Mamanwa | |
---|---|
Native to | Philippines |
Region | Agusan del Norte and Surigao provinces, Mindanao |
Native speakers | (5,200 cited 1990 census)[1] |
Latin | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | mmn |
Glottolog | mama1275 |
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.[2][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 possibly even 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).
General references
- 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.
References
- Mamanwa at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
- 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.
- Miller, J., and H. Miller. 1976. Mamanwa Grammar. Language Data: Asian-Pacific Series No. 8. Huntington Beach, CA: Summer Institute of Linguistics.