The Mamanwa language is a Central Philippine language spoken in the provinces of Agusan del Norte and Surigao in Mindanao, Philippines. It had about 5,000 speakers in 1990, mostly Mamanwa. 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. 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).