The name 'Carrier' is a translation of the Sekani name 'aɣele' "people who carry things around on their backs", due to the fact that the first Europeans to learn of the Carrier, the Northwest Company explorers led by Alexander Mackenzie, first passed through the territory of the Carriers' Sekani neighbours.

[2] The received view of the origin of the Sekani name is that it refers to the distinctive Carrier mortuary practice in which a widow carried her husband's ashes on her back during the period of mourning.

An alternative hypothesis is that it refers to the fact that the Dakeł, unlike the Sekani, participated in trade with the coast, which required packing loads of goods over the Grease Trails.

[3] There are three series of stops and affricates: aspirated, unaspirated (written voiced in the practical orthography), and ejective.

As of the late 20th century, some conservative older speakers of Carrier had a contrast between apico-alveolar and lamino-dental series of fricatives and affricates.

The contrast had become so obscure that when, in 1995, after many years of effort, the Carrier Bible Fellowship finally published he Stuart Lake dialect translation of the New Testament, they omitted marking of the lamino-dental series.

The great majority of instances of /ə/ are predictable from the phonotactics, introduced in order to create an acceptable syllable structure.

The remaining instances are all found in certain forms of the verb where the morphology requires some vowel to be present.

Carrier has a very simple tone system of the type often described as pitch accent—it is in fact very similar to the prototypical pitch-accent language, Japanese.

Representing this phonemic drop in pitch with the downstep symbol ꜜ, there is a contrast between the surface tone following an unaccented word xoh "goose" compared with the accented word yesꜜ "wolf": However, after a tonic syllable, the high pitch of jəsꜜ "wolf" is lost: In general, Carrier syllables are maximally CVC.

The CLC writing system was designed to be typed on a standard English typewriter.

It uses numerous digraphs and trigraphs to write the many Carrier consonants not found in English, e.g. ⟨gh⟩ for [ɣ] and ⟨lh⟩ for [ɬ], with an apostrophe to mark glottalization, e.g. ⟨ts'⟩ for the ejective alveolar affricate.

The only diacritic it uses in its standard form is the underscore, which is written under the sibilants (⟨s̲⟩, ⟨z̲⟩, ⟨t̲s̲⟩, and ⟨d̲z̲⟩) to indicate that the consonant is laminal denti-alveolar rather than apical alveolar.

Number is marked only on nouns denoting human beings and dogs, and these distinguish only singular and plural.

(The fact that the vowel is [e] rather than [ə] is the result of a phonological rule that changes /ə/ to [e] immediately preceding /ʔ/ in noun prefixes and in the disjunct zone of the verb.)

With very limited exceptions, only nouns denoting human beings and dogs have distinct plural forms.

Where the deverbal noun is derived by means of the agentive suffix / -ən/ the verb is almost invariably in the third person singular form, which is to say, not marked for number.

The basic paradigm of a verb consists of three persons in three numbers, with the tenses and modes Imperfective, Perfective, Future, and Optative, in both affirmative and negative forms.

Dakelh is neighbored on the west by Babine-Witsuwit'en and Haisla, to the north by Sekani, to the southeast by Shuswap, to the south by Chilcotin, and to the southwest by Nuxalk.

A particularly interesting example is [maj] ('berry, fruit'), a loan from Gitksan, which has been borrowed into all Dakelh dialects and has displaced the original Athabascan word.

A single loan from Spanish is known: [mandah] ('canvas, tarpaulin'), from manta, apparently acquired from Spanish-speaking packers.

The trade language Chinook Jargon came into use among Dakelh people as a result of European contact.

Knowledge of Chinook Jargon may have been more common in the southwestern part of Dakelh country due to its use at Bella Coola.

According to Dwyer's article on tools and techniques for endangered language assessment and revitalization,[11] the three most critical factors out of the nine are factors numbered one - intergenerational transmission, three - proportion of speakers within the total population, and four - trends in existing language domains.

Its activities include research, archiving, curriculum development, teacher training, literacy instruction, and production of teaching and reference materials.

Prior to the founding of YDLI in 1988 the Carrier Linguistic Committee, a group based in Fort Saint James affiliated with the Summer Institute of Linguistics, produced a number of publications in Dakelh, literacy materials for several dialects, a 3000-entry dictionary of the Stuart Lake dialect,[12] and various other materials.

More recent work includes the publication of some substantial pieces of text by the Carrier Linguistic Committee, the publication of a grammar sketch, and the on-going creation of a large electronic dictionary, with a corresponding print version, that contains earlier material, including Morice's, as well as much new material.

The first is the heavy influence of English, the dominant language in education, business, government and media.

Speakers of Carrier may also find speaking their language traumatic after their abuse in the residential school system.

[15] Here are the Dakelh names for some of the major places in Dakelh territory, written in the Carrier Linguistic Committee writing system: The earliest record of the language consists of a list of 25 words recorded[16] by Alexander MacKenzie on June 22, 1793.