Manide is spoken by nearly 4,000 Negrito people, most of whom reside in the towns of Labo, Jose Panganiban, and Paracale.
[2] Between 1903 and 1924, John M. Garvan (1963) visited Negrito Filipino communities in the region of Luzon and recorded the name Manide.
[2] In a survey of 1000 lexical items, 285 appeared to be unique, including new coinages which are forms that experienced semantic and or phonological shifts over time.
[4] According to a handful of words remembered by a group self-identifying as Katabangan on the Bondoc Peninsula, as reported by Zubiri, that language may have also been related to Manide and Inagta Alabat.
Fronting may occur due to assimilation to nearby sounds, or it may form independently.
It is part of a feature among many Negrito Filipino languages from northern Luzon to Manide.
Low vowel backing is unique to Manide, as it is not known to occur in any other language of the Philippines.
Something very unusual is that Manide uses the same case markers for personal names just as used with common nouns.