Mbre, also spelled Bre, Bεrε, Pre, is a endangered language

Endangered language

An endangered language is a language that is at risk of falling out of use. If it loses all its native speakers, it becomes a dead language. If eventually no one speaks the language at all it becomes an "extinct language"....

 spoken not far from the city of Bouaké

Bouaké

Bouaké is the second largest city in Côte d'Ivoire, with a population of 775,300 . It is the main urban settlement of the Bouaké Department with a population exceeding 1.2 million, in the Vallée du Bandama Region...

, Ivory Coast. It had 200 speakers out of an ethnic population of 700 in the year 2000, in two villages, down from 15 villages some years earlier. Speakers are shifting to the neighboring Manding language

Manding languages

The Manding languages are a fairly mutually intelligible group of dialects or languages in West Africa, belonging to the Mande languages. Their best-known members are Bambara, the most widely spoken language in Mali; Mandinka, the main language of Gambia; Maninka or Malinké, a major language of...

 Koro, and the language has large numbers of Manding loan words.

Mbre does not appear to belong to any of the traditional branches of the Niger–Congo language family. It was described in an unpublished manuscript by Denis Creissels

Denis Creissels

Denis Creissels is a French Professor of linguistics at the University of Lyon.After studying Mathematics and Russian, he has taught general linguistics at the University of Grenoble from 1970 to 1996, and at the University of Lyon from 1996 to 2008...

. Roger Blench

Roger Blench

Roger Blench is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and remains based in Cambridge, England...

 suspects it may form its own branch, though perhaps not far from the Kwa languages

Kwa languages

The Kwa languages, often specified as New Kwa, are a proposed but as-yet-undemonstrated family of languages spoken in the south-eastern part of Côte d'Ivoire, across southern Ghana, and in central Togo...

.

Mbre is not related to Mpre

Mpre language

Mpre Mpra is a language once spoken in the village of Butie in Ghana, near the confluence of the Black and White Voltas, that has been difficult to classify...

, an extinct and unclassified language

Unclassified language

Unclassified languages are languages whose genetic affiliation has not been established by means of historical linguistics. If this state of affairs continues after significant study of the language and efforts to relate it to other languages, as in the case of Basque, it is termed a language...

of Ghana.