"Winnebago," a name now used for the Ho-Chunk who were forcibly removed to Nebraska, is an exonym, an Anglicization of the Sauk and Fox word Oinepegi.

All Dorsey's Law sequences attested in the language are listed below, with V representing the copied vowel:[6] Multiple sources advocate that Dorsey's Law is a synchronic process in the language because of the way that things like stress assignment and the morphological process of reduplication are affected by it.

[9][10] A few rare examples of words with primary stress not on the third syllable include booráxux 'you break something into pieces' and gikąnąhé 'to invite somebody.'

Examples include hąąbókahi 'every day' (a compound consisting of hąąp 'day' and hokahí 'every') and wąągwácek 'young man' (wąąk 'man' and wacék 'young').

[10] The official Ho-Chunk orthography derives from an Americanist version of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

The diacritic marks can be referred to in Ho-Chunk with the following terms: sįįc 'tail' for the ogonek, wookąnąk 'hat' for the haček, and hiyuša jikere 'sudden start/stop' for the glottal stop.

For a short period of time in the mid to late 1800s, Ho-Chunk was written with an adaptation of the "Ba-Be-Bi-Bo" syllabics system.

The Ho-Chunk Nations of Wisconsin and Nebraska represent some sounds differently in the alphabets that they use, as the Wisconsin tribe write a double vowel to mark longer length, and the Nebraska tribe uses a macron over the vowel (compare oo with ō for IPA /o:/).

[5] Ho-Chunk is a pro-drop language; pronouns are used very infrequently, and information on grammatical person is found on the verb in the form of one or more prefixes.

Ho-Chunk's transitive verbs are inflected with agent (actor) and patient (undergoer) pronominals.

The sounds in the prefixes run together in casual speech, often leading to the deletion of the /h/ consonant and thus a long vowel or diphthong.

An example is šgaac 'play,' which is inflected for person and number as follows: Intransitive stative verbs involve an action affecting a patient.

Like other Siouan languages, Ho-Chunk's basic word order is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV).An example of a typical sentence is Hinųkra wažątirehižą ruwį 'The woman bought a car.'

In a sentence with two objects, such as Hinųkiža hocįcįhižą wiiwagaxhižą hok'ų 'A girl gave a boy a pencil,' the canonical word order is Subject-Indirect Object-Direct Object-Verb.

Unknown glossing abbreviation(s) (help);Although the language is highly endangered, there are currently vigorous efforts underway to keep it alive in Ho-Chunk communities.

In Nebraska, the Ho-Chunk Renaissance program teaches the language in local and reservation schools.

Both tribal governments recognize the importance of technology in language learning, and are active in Facebook and YouTube to reach the younger generation of learners.

A "Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) Native American Language app" is available for iPhone, iPad, and other iOS devices.