The Dahalo, former elephant hunters, are dispersed among Swahili and other Bantu peoples, with no villages of their own, and are bilingual in those languages.

It contrasts laminal and apical stops, as in languages of Australia and California; epiglottal and glottal stops and fricatives, as in the Mideast, the Caucasus, and the American Pacific Northwest; and is perhaps the only language in the world to contrast alveolar lateral and palatal lateral fricatives and affricates.

[4] The inventory according to the former is presented below: Tosco's account differs in not including the labialized clicks, the palatal laterals, and the voiceless prenasalized consonants (on which see below), analyzing /t͇ʼ/ as /tsʼ/, and adding /dɮ/, /ʄ/ and /v/ (which Maddieson et al. believe to be an allophone of /w/).

This typologically extraordinary inventory appears to result from extended contact influence from substratal and superstratal languages, due to long-running bilinguality.

Several phonemes can be shown to be recent intrusions into the language through loanwords:[4] Additionally, several consonants are marginal in their occurrence.

Five are only attested in a single root: Less than five examples each are known of /ᵑʇˀʷ, tʃ, tsʼ, tʃʼ, kʷʼ, dɮ, ʄ, ⁿd͇, ⁿdz/.

/b d̪ d͇/ are often opened to approximants [β̞ ð̞ ð͇˕] or weak fricatives [β ð ð͇] between vowels (sometimes a retraction diacritic is used as in ⟨d̠⟩, serving merely to emphasize that it is further back than /d̪/).

Voiced consonants partially devoice, and prenasalized stops denasalize when geminated as part of a grammatical function.

Dahalo is one of very few languages outside southern Africa to have phonemic clicks (the others being Sandawe and Hadza in Tanzania and Damin, a ceremonial register of Lardil formerly spoken on Mornington Island in Australia).

Ten Raa shows some slight evidence that speakers of Dahalo once spoke a language similar to Sandawe, which does have clicks.