Fewer than a hundred native speakers, mostly elderly, in a few settlements in the southwest of Koryak Autonomous Okrug, remained in 1993.

[4] According to the second theory, Itelmen is not related to other Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages; common elements are due to contact.

[5] Initial comparisons of the basic Itelmen lexicon to Chukotkan show that only a third of the word stock is cognate.

Originally the Kamchatkan languages were spoken throughout Kamchatka and possibly also in the northern Kuril Islands.

Vladimir Atlasov, who annexed Kamchatka and established military bases in the region, estimated in 1697 that there were about 20,000 ethnic Itelmens.

During the Soviet era the process of assimilation intensified, as Itelmen communities were moved by force and children were sent to boarding schools where they were required to speak Russian.

Itelmen is now a highly endangered language, and most speakers are aged over sixty and live in scattered communities.

Itelmen has a larger phonological inventory than other Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages, and permits complex consonant clusters in some environments.

Writing based on Latin graphemes was introduced in 1932 (an alphabet book and arithmetic textbook were published).

Teaching from the alphabet book of 1932 (authored by ethnographer Elizabeth Porfirevna Orlova and co-produced by a group of Itelmen students) lasted several years, but after alphabets for "Northern" languages were transformed into Cyrillic at the end of the 1930s, Itelmen writing was abolished.

The modern Itelmen alphabet was created in 1984 on a Cyrillic basis and in 1988 was confirmed by the Russian Ministry of Education.

Itelmen has been taught as a subject in elementary grades, but teachers do not speak the language like the students.

To take the second hypothesis, Itelmen was at the very beginning an agglutinative language, with word structure (m) + R + (m) (where R is a root and (m) one of several word-changing morphemes), it was nominal, compounds were prohibited; it preserves all of these elements into the present.

A difference in reported material origin with Chukotko-Koryak languages in declensional and conjugational paradigms is the result of convergent development under conditions of a Chukotko-Kamchatkan sprachbund.

Reduplication of a root, inherent to all the languages of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan group, was able to develop in Itelmen apart from the influence of contact.