They tend to be divided among the following semantic lines: The class usually labelled "feminine" (II) inspired the title of George Lakoff's book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.

Some linguists distinguish between such systems of classification and the gendered division of items into the categories of "feminine", "masculine" and (sometimes) "neuter" that is found in, for example, many Indo-European languages.

Sentences with a first or second person pronoun have their verb arguments marked for case in a pattern that mimics nominative–accusative languages.

[11] Speakers were forbidden from speaking with their cross-cousins of the opposite sex due to the fact that those relatives were of the section from which an individual must marry, but were too close of kin to choose as a spouse so the avoidance might have been on the grounds of indicating anyone sexually unavailable.

[11] Furthermore, because marriage typically took place a generation above or below, the cross-cousin of the opposite sex often is a potential mother-in-law or father-in-law.

[12] In addition, when within hearing range of taboo relatives a person was required to use a specialized and complex form of the language with essentially the same phonemes and grammar, but with a lexicon that shared no words with the standard language except for four lexical items referring to grandparents on the mother and father's side.

[11] This relationship also prevailed among both genders such that a daughter-in-law was forbidden to speak to directly or approach her father-in-law and vice versa.

[11] The Dyalŋuy had one quarter of the amount of lexical items as the everyday language which reduced the semantic content in actual communication in the presence of a taboo relative.

[15] The lexical items found in Dyalŋuy were mainly derived from three sources: "borrowings from the everyday register of neighbouring dialects or languages, the creation of new [Dyalŋuy] forms by phonological deformation of lexemes from the language's own everyday style, and the borrowing of terms that were already in the [Dyalŋuy] style of a neighboring language or dialect".

[11] It is hypothesized that children of Dyirbal tribes were expected to acquire the Dyalŋuy speech style years following their acquisition of the everyday speech style from their cross cousins who would speak in Dyalŋuy in their presence.

In the 1970s, speakers of Dyirbal and Giramay dialects purchased land in the Murray Upper, with the assistance of the Australian federal government and formed a community.