Elamite is an agglutinative language,[9] and its grammar was characterized by an extensive and pervasive nominal class system.

[11] These documents represent administrative activity and data flow in Persepolis over more than fifty consecutive years (509 to 457 BC).

There are no later direct references, but Elamite may be the local language in which, according to the Talmud, the Book of Esther was recited annually to the Jews of Susa in the Sasanian Empire (224–642).

The city had recently become prosperous again after the foundation of a market when it received an influx of foreigners and being a Khuzi was stigmatized at the time.

Its consonants included at least stops /p/, /t/ and /k/, sibilants /s/, /ʃ/ and /z/ (with an uncertain pronunciation), nasals /m/ and /n/, liquids /l/ and /r/ and fricative /h/, which was lost in late Neo-Elamite.

Some peculiarities of the spelling have been interpreted as suggesting that there was a contrast between two series of stops (/p/, /t/, /k/ as opposed to /b/, /d/, /ɡ/), but in general, such a distinction was not consistently indicated by written Elamite.

It was, to a great extent, broken down in Achaemenid Elamite, where possession and, sometimes, attributive relationships are uniformly expressed with the “genitive case” suffix -na appended to the modifier: e.g. šak X-na “son of X”.

They are as follows:[19] In general, no special possessive pronouns are needed in view of the construction with the noun class suffixes.

There is no consensus on the exact meaning of the periphrastic forms with ma-, but durative, intensive or volitional interpretations have been suggested.

[22] Verbal forms can be converted into the heads of subordinate clauses through the addition of the nominalising suffix -a, much as in Sumerian: siyan in-me kuši-hš(i)-me-a “the temple which they did not build”.

-ti/-ta can be suffixed to verbs, chiefly of conjugation I, expressing possibly a meaning of anteriority (perfect and pluperfect tense).

[27] There are often resumptive pronouns before the verb – often long sequences, especially in Middle Elamite (ap u in duni-h "to-them I it gave").

[28] The language uses postpositions such as -ma "in" and -na "of", but spatial and temporal relationships are generally expressed in Middle Elamite by means of "directional words" originating as nouns or verbs.

In Middle Elamite, the most common way to construct a relative clause is to attach a nominal class suffix to the clause-final verb, optionally followed by the relativizing suffix -a: thus, lika-me i-r hani-š-r(i) "whose reign he loves", or optionally lika-me i-r hani-š-r-a.

[29] Middle Elamite (Šutruk-Nahhunte I, 1200–1160 BC; EKI 18, IRS 33): Transliteration: (1) ú DIŠšu-ut-ru-uk-dnah-hu-un-te ša-ak DIŠhal-lu-du-uš-din-šu-ši- (2) -na-ak-gi-ik su-un-ki-ik an-za-an šu-šu-un-ka4 e-ri-en- (3) -tu4-um ti-pu-uh a-ak hi-ya-an din-šu-ši-na-ak na-pír (4) ú-ri-me a-ha-an ha-li-ih-ma hu-ut-tak ha-li-ku-me (5) din-šu-ši-na-ak na-pír ú-ri in li-na te-la-ak-ni Transcription: U Šutruk-Nahhunte, šak Halluduš-Inšušinak-(i)k, sunki-k Anzan Šušun-k(a).

[35] Recent discoveries regarding early population migration based on ancient DNA analysis have revived interest in the possible connection between proto-Elamite and proto-Dravidian.

[41] In 2002 George Starostin published a lexicostatistic analysis finding Elamite to be approximately equidistant from Nostratic and Semitic.

[30] The study of Elamite language goes back to the first publications of Achaemenid royal inscriptions in Europe in the first half of the 19th century CE.

A great step forward was the publication of the Elamite version of the Bisotun inscription in the name of Darius I, entrusted by Henry Rawlinson to Edwin Norris and appeared in 1855.

The first to use the glottonym Elamite is considered to be Archibald Henry Sayce in 1874, even if already in 1850 Isidore Löwenstern advanced this identification.

Another administrative corpus was discovered in the 1970s at Tall-i Malyan, the ancient city of Anshan, and published in 1984 by Matthew W. Stolper.

In the meantime (1967), the Middle Elamite inscriptions from Chogha Zanbil were published by father Marie-Joseph Steve.

In the fourth quarter of the 20th century the French school was led by François Vallat, with relevant studies by Françoise Grillot(-Susini) and Florence Malbran-Labat, while the American school of scholars, inaugurated by George G. Cameron and Herbert H. Paper, focused on the administrative corpora with Stolper.