Mano

Mano (autonymously Maa) is a Southeast Mande Niger-Congo language of the Mano-Dan group, spoken by ~400,000 people across the Nimba Mountains region of West Africa where Liberia, Guinea, and Côte d'Ivoire converge. The Mano people are agriculturalists in the rainforest, with a strong oral tradition and the historical Mano-Dan secret-society initiation rituals. Linguistically, Mano shares Southeast Mande features with sister Dan (dnj): SOV constituent order (rare in Africa), tone system (~3 tones), classifier-noun constructions, and an absence of grammatical gender. Khachaturyan's 2015 reference grammar is the major modern documentation.