[5] The language is unwritten and almost solely spoken within the Manang District, leading it to be classified as threatened, with the number of speakers continuing to decline.
Suspected reasons for the decline include parents not passing down the language to their children, in order to allow for what they see as more advanced communication with other groups of people, and thus gain more opportunities.
[10] The retroflex fricative /ʂ/ is subject to some inter-speaker variation, realized either as [ʂ] or as [ʃ] by different speakers.
Of the four tones, the first stays consistently mid-level throughout the entire word, whereas the second tonal type starts at a 4 and increases in pitch to a 5.
However, from the minimal field research carried out, there is often not a distinguishable difference between syllable emphasis, and exceptions are also present.
The Manange lexicon is composed largely of words that are clearly of Tibeto-Burman/Sino-Tibetan origin, as found in the glossaries published by Hildebrandt (2004), Hoshi[10][15] and Nagano.
However, Hildebrandt notes that loanwords are not used equally by all segments of the Manange-speaking population, and that there is a noticeable split between the vocabulary found in the daily use of Mananges who were born and raised in Nepali-speaking areas such as Kathmandu versus those born and raised in traditional Manange-speaking villages and towns in Manang District.
Hildebrandt also notes that within-family borrowing is also likely, but is harder to determine because of extreme lexical similarity across Tibetic languages of the region.
Loanwords in Manange are primarily nouns, including semantic categories of clothing, food, and concepts that encode the modern world.
Loaned verbs in Manange incorporate a "dummy affix" ti, and then carry the full range of aspect and modality morphology.
[1] While the language is able to be spoken by older generations, and continuing to be passed onto newer ones, the rate at which it is being taught is sharply declining.
In reality however, fewer people actually spoke the languages they claimed to, leading to exaggerated speaker numbers being listed.
[3] Despite the relatively small number of speakers, allowing the language to die out entirely will be detrimental to the world as a whole.
The endangered status of Manang means that researchers should attempt to collect as much detailed documentation and audio recordings now, before the language is potentially lost.