The Nuxalk language is known as It7Nuxalkmc with the 7 representing a glottal stop in Nuxalk. Nuxalk is known for its extreme consonant clusters, even among Salishan languages, for example “hummingbird” is xwnxwnm. “tree” is stn, “mountain” is smt or smnt, qw’litq means “seagull” and ts’lkt means “a bald eagle”.

Nuxalk is quite divergent compared to other Salishan languages, but like other coast Salishan languages for example, Nuxalk sometimes uses similar phrasing to some Indo-European languages, along with there also being other similarities. For example ti smnt tc n ti tsalh tc - “the mountain and the lake”. The phrase ti smnt tc means something like “the mountain”, ti is a masculine deictic prefix, somewhat akin to an article, whilst tc is the corresponding deictic suffix. The word n means “and”, and ti tsalh tc translates to “the lake” in this context. Verbs in Nuxalk generally come before nouns, with the language generally having a VSO or “verb-subject-object” word order. For example: tl’ap ti Qwaxw tc - “the Raven goes”, literally tl’ap “goes”, ti Qwaxw tc - “the Raven”. , anayk tsi cnas tsc ska ksnmaks ala tsalh ts - “the lady wants work at the lake”, from anayk - “want(s)”, “intend(s)”, tsi cnas tsc - “the woman”, ska - a “particle” which implies a future intension, whilst also meaning something like “that” in this context, ksnmaks - “he/she/it works”, ala tsalh ts - “at the lake”. The part: ska ksnmaks together means something like “that she works”, but this is how this kind of sentence would be generally phrased in Nuxalk. In general it means something like “intends the woman that she works at the lake”.

Whilst Nuxalk nouns in standalone forms can illustrate a grammar in Nuxalk that is in many respects akin to that of Celtic, Germanic or some Afro-Asiatic languages for example, Nuxalk is also a very polysynthetic language when it comes to its verbs. Nuxalk possesses for example suffixed forms of many nouns, which exist alongside, and help to form larger nouns. For example a “boat” on its own as a standalone noun is lhalas. However, there is also a specific suffix meaning “boat”, which is -ulalh, so if one was to say “I build a boat”, it could be expressed as tamulalhts, which is from the roots tam- - “to do” or “make”, -ulalh - the suffix for “boat”, and -ts the first person singular suffix.

Suffixes in Nuxalk can be much more complex, and incorporate multiple ideas and meanings. Another suffix is -ulhiixw - “head hair”, which can be formed into the verb ts’xulhiixw - “having white hair”.

Verb suffixes in Nuxalk also incorporate both the subject and object “pronouns”, for example “I make them” is tamtits with the -tits suffix being specifically for an action done by the first person singular and relating to the third person plural. To say for example “you make” and “you make them”, this would be tamnu - “you (singular) make”, with -nu being the second person singular “pronoun” suffix, whilst “you (singular) make them” would be tamticw, with -ticw being the suffix incorporating the “pronouns” you singular, as the doer, and “they” or the third person singular as the “pronoun” the action relates to. These polysynthetic verb forms can also be incorporated with standalone nouns, for example tamticw wa sulh 7ats - “you make these houses”, literally “make(you-them) (the) houses (these)”.