The word "Dolgan", derived from Evenki, means 'tribe living on the middle reaches of the river'.

[6] Dolgan, along with its close relative Sakha (Yakut), belongs to the North Siberian subbranch of the Turkic language family.

Like most other Turkic languages, Dolgan has vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, subject-object-verb word order, and lacks grammatical gender.

Dolgich's (1963: 129) statement in his well-known paper on the origin of the Dolgans: " ... долганский язык является диалектом якутского языка."

[citation needed] The Dolgan language started out having a Latin alphabet in the early 20th century.

Evenki's influence on Dolgan can explain, in part, why it is considered a separate language from Yakut.

For instance, the directional terms tās (1. south 2. east) and muora (1. north 2. west) are representative of the corresponding landscapes.

[9] Tās is related to the word stone, and the southeast topography of the native region, Taymyr Peninsula, is covered by the Putorana Mountains.

The first version of alphabet of the language had the following appearance: А а, Б б, В в, Г г, Д д, Дь дь, Е е, Ё ё, Ж ж, З з, И и, Иэ иэ, Й й, К к, Л л, М м, Н н, Ӈ ӈ, Нь нь, О о, Ө ө, П п, Р р, С с, Т т, У у, Уо уо, Ү ү, Үө үө, Ф ф, Х х, Һ һ, Ц ц, Ч ч, Ш ш, Щ щ, Ъ ъ, Ы ы, Ыа ыа, Ь ь, Э э, Ю ю, Я я.

In conjugation of a verb in the common form of -ааччы, the paradigms of Dolgan inclination were preserved with the word баар.