Before contact with Europeans, it was spoken along the northern and southern shores of Clear Lake to the north of San Francisco, and in the coast mountains west of Sacramento Valley.

A documentation project for the language, which had not been written down, started in 2003 at the Big Valley Rancheria.

[5] As of 2006, 59-year-old Loretta Kelsey was the one remaining Elem Pomo speaker, or "language keeper".

Although Kelsey is teaching younger speakers, it is not clear whether the language can be maintained based on her knowledge.

[2] In 2008, Kelsey, the daughter of a former tribal chief, was disenrolled from the tribe along with 24 family members, despite having "lived on the rancheria for most of her 59 years.

"[6] Downloads of Elem Pomo documentation are available from the electronic repository of the California Indian Museum and Cultural Center.

In many linguistic descriptions of Eastern Pomo, Americanist phonetic notation is used, and a mid-dot represents long vowels: a· e· i· o· u·.

The voiceless plosives have a three-way distinction for each point of articulation: unaspirated (plain), aspirated, and ejective.

In linguistic publications using Americanist phonetic notation the alveolar plosive series is distinguished from the dental one with the addition of under-dots: ṭ ṭʰ ṭ’; the palatal consonants /tʃ tʃʰ tʃʼ ʃ/ are written č čʰ č’ š; the alveolar affricates /ts tsʰ tsʼ/ are written c cʰ c’; and the voiceless nasals, semivowels, and liquid are written using capital letters: M N W Y L. There are a number of restrictions on the distribution of the various phonemes.

For example, /pʰorkʰ/, 'knock something (as acorns, fruit) off something (as tree)', shows a two consonant cluster in word-final position.

Across syllable boundaries in the middle of a word, it is common for there to be two-consonant sequences without restrictions, except that unaspirated stops, voiced stops, voiceless nasals, voiceless semi-vowels, and /h/ don't occur syllable-finally.

The roots of polysyllabic words cannot always be isolated in this language, making it impossible to predict where the primary stress is going to fall solely on the type of morpheme.

Consonant Ablaut: This process affects aspirated stops (plosives) except /t̺ʰ/, and the fricative /x/.

The verbal or non-verbal function of a morphological unit is specified by the addition of inflectional suffixes, and/or syntactic relations.

There are eight optional position classes of suffixes for verbs, specifying categories of aspect, mode, plurality, locality, reciprocity, source of information (evidentials), and forms of syntactic relations.

They are inflected for subject, object, genitive, and comitative through the processes of suffixation and partial suppletion.

A common stem is often used to apply to a variety of situations, which may not be formally associated in the typical English perspective.

And at the same time, a single event can be described by a variety of stems depending on what aspect of the act is in focus.

Unanalyzable stems consist of a longer sequence of phonemes than roots, such as CVC, or CVCV.

For example, in the word mi·ṭʰi’ṭʰik’i·l, meaning 'kick something along, a little way at a time,' where only the root is reduplicated, it is possible that only one toe is used to do the kicking.

Grammatical evidentiality is expressed by four evidential suffixes that are added to verbs: -ink’e (nonvisual sensory), -ine (inferential), -·le (hearsay), -ya (direct knowledge):[9] Eastern Pomo, like the other Pomoan languages, exhibits a system of switch-reference, whereby suffixes are used to mark whether a clause has the same or a different subject from the preceding clause.