What happens to class when a language dies? Language change vs. language death

This paper presents the first documentation of the noun class system of the dying language Mani (buy), Bullom So in Ethnologue, a.k.a. Mmani, Mandenyi, etc.) spoken in Guinea and Sierra Leone. Mani has some few hundred speakers, all of whom speak either Soso (sus) or Temne (tem) as their everyday language. The Mani are concentrated in a restricted coastal area straddling the border between Guinea and Sierra Leone near the town of Morebaya, Kambia District, in Sierra Leone. A few other speakers are scattered in the littoral region from Conakry to Freetown. Adapted from the source document