Epidemics soon led to a drastic reduction in the Haida population, which became limited to three villages: Masset, Skidegate, and Hydaburg.

The Northern Haida dialects have developed pharyngeal consonants, typologically uncommon sounds which are also found in some of the nearby Salishan and Wakashan languages.

The Haida sound system includes ejective consonants, glottalized sonorants, contrastive vowel length, and phonemic tone.

Haida has the rare direct-inverse verbal alignment where instead of nominal cases, it is marked whether the grammatical subject and object follow or not a hierarchy between persons and noun classes.

[7] The Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858 led to a boom in the town of Victoria, and Southern Haida began traveling there annually, mainly for the purpose of selling their women.

"[9] In 1862, William Duncan, a British Anglican missionary stationed at Fort Simpson, took fifty Tsimshian converts and created a new model community, Metlakatla, in Alaska.

[10] The new village was greatly successful, and throughout the Northwest coast the attitude spread that abandoning tradition would pave the way for a better life.

John Henry Keen translated the Book of Common Prayer into Haida, published in 1899 in London by the Church Mission Society.

It has been by sheer determination that I now have the whole service (except hymns and canticles) in the vernacular.Beginning at the turn of the century, Haida began sending their children to residential schools.

"[19] In 2017 Kingulliit Productions was working on the first feature film to be acted entirely in Haida; the actors had to be trained to pronounce the lines correctly.

[20] The film, entitled SGaawaay K’uuna ("Edge of the Knife"), was due to be released in the United Kingdom in April 2019.

[23] This theory is not universally accepted; for example, Enrico (2004) argues that Haida does in fact belong to the Na-Dené family, though early loanwords make the evidence problematic.

[22] A proposal linking Na-Dené to the Yeniseian family of central Siberia finds no evidence for including Haida.

[25] In Alaskan Haida, all velar, uvular, and epiglottal consonants, as well as /n l j/ for some speakers, have rounded variants resulting from coalescence of clusters with /w/.

[39] In Skidegate Haida, some instances of the vowel /a/ are on an underlying level unspecified for quality; Enrico (2003) marks specified /a/ with the symbol ⟨⟩ .

[47] Some alternations may be interpreted as results of syllable parsing rather than marked tone: compare Masset q'al.a [qʼálà] 'muskeg' to q'ala [qʼàlà] 'be suspicious of', where .

[47] In Skidegate Haida, short vowels which do not have marked tone are phonetically lengthened when they are in a word-initial open syllable, thus q'an [qʼán] "grass" becomes q'anaa [qʼàːnáː] "grassy".

[16] In Masset Haida, marked low tone syllables have extra length, thus ginn "thing", 7aww "mother".

The linguist John Enrico created another orthography for Skidegate and Masset Haida which introduced ⟨7⟩ and ⟨@⟩ as letters and did away with the distinction between upper and lower case, and this system is popular in Canada.

[58][59][60] Another alphabet was devised by Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC) for Kaigani Haida in 1972, based on Tlingit orthographic conventions, and is still in use.

[63] The word classes in Haida are nouns, verbs, postpositions, demonstratives, quantifiers, adverbs, clitics, exclamations, replies, classifiers, and instrumentals.

[76][78] The third person pronoun that is pluralized can have any grammatical function, e.g. tsiin-ee 'laangaa hl dah rujuu-7wa-gan "I bought all their fish" (Masset).

[76] Most nouns referring to family relationships have special vocative forms, e.g. chanáa (Alaskan) chaníi (Masset) "grandfather!

[83] The Alaskan postposition of -k has been updated in the current Alaska Haida orthography to -g. These also fuse with a preceding suffix -kw to become -gwiik and -guust.

[88] There are four classes of verb stems:[nb 6] Habitual aspect uses the suffix -gang in the present and inferential and -(g)iinii in the past.

[95] For some types of objects, classificatory prefixes are used, e.g. sdlakw dlasáng "two land otters" (dla- = small animal or fish).

[16] Some vowel-initial suffixes cause nouns and verbs which are consonant-final and polysyllabic to undergo Final Syllable Shortening (FSS).

[97] The determinants of potency are complex and include "acquaintance, social rank, humanness, animacy.. number ... [and] gender was also important at least in the two southern dialects.

[102] Clitic pronouns are used as complements of verbs, as inalienable possessives, with quantifiers, and in Skidegate Haida as the objects of some postpositions.

[113] Relational nouns take some special third person possessive pronouns ('láa, 'wáa, tl'áa rather than hal, ahljíi, tl'), e.g. 'wáa ḵáahlii "in(side) it" (lit.