"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."

"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."

"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."

"The few fluent speakers are all over fifty years old, and there are no monolingual Mmani speakers."