Kapampangan is also spoken in northeastern Bataan, as well as in the provinces of Bulacan, Nueva Ecija, and Zambales that border Pampanga.

These languages share the same reflex /j/ of the proto-Malayo-Polynesian *R.[8] Kapampangan is derived from the root word pampáng ('riverbank').

A number of Kapampangan dictionaries and grammar books were written during the Spanish colonial period.

Diego Bergaño [pam] wrote two 18th-century books about the language: Arte de la lengua Pampanga (first published in 1729)[9] and Vocabulario de la lengua Pampanga (first published in 1732).

In Mindanao, a significant Kapampangan-speaking minority also exists in Cagayan de Oro, Davao City and South Cotabato, specifically in General Santos and the municipalities of Polomolok and Tupi.

According to the 2000 Philippine census, 2,312,870 people (out of the total population of 76,332,470) spoke Kapampangan as their native language.

Monophthongs have allophones in unstressed and syllable-final positions: In the chart of Kapampangan consonants, all stops are unaspirated.

Unlike other languages of the Philippines but similar to Ilocano, Kapampangan uses /h/ only in words of foreign origin.

Proto-Philippine *tanəm is tanam ('to plant') in Kapampangan, compared with Tagalog tanim, Cebuano tanom and Ilocano tanem ('grave').

The Kapampangan word for 'new' is bayu; it is bago in Tagalog, baro in Ilocano, and baru in Indonesian.

Kapampangan can form long words through extensive use of affixes, for example: Mikakapapagbabalabalangingiananangananan, 'a group of people having their noses bleed at the same time', Mikakapapagsisiluguranan, 'everyone loves each other', Makapagkapampangan, 'can speak Kapampangan', and Mengapangaibuganan, 'until to fall in love'.

Ergative or genitive markers mark the object (usually indefinite) of an intransitive verb and the actor of a transitive one.

Oblique markers, similar to prepositions in English, mark (for example) location and direction.

Kapampangan differs from many Philippine languages in requiring the pronoun even if the noun it represents, or the grammatical antecedent, is present.

The pronouns ya and la have special forms when they are used in conjunction with the words ati ('there is/are') and ala ('there is/are not').

Kapampangan's demonstrative pronouns differ from other Philippine languages by having separate forms for singular and plural.

Kapampangan verbs are morphologically complex, and take a variety of affixes reflecting focus, aspect and mode.

[13] DIR:direct case morpheme S‹um›ulat ‹AT›will.writeyangya=ng3SG.DIR=ACCpoesia poeming DIRlalaki boygamit OBLpen penking OBLpapil.

The root word sulat ('write') exists in Tagalog and Kapampangan: The object-focus suffix -an represents two focuses; the only difference is that one conjugation preserves -an in the completed aspect, and it is dropped in the other conjugation: Other Philippine languages have separate forms; Tagalog has -in and -an, Bikol and most of the Visayan languages have -on and -an, and Ilokano has -en and -an due to historical sound changes in the proto-Philippine /*e/.

A number of actor-focus verbs do not use the infix -um-, but are usually conjugated like other verbs which do (for example, gawa ('to do'), bulus ('to immerse'), terak ('to dance'), lukas ('to take off'), sindi ('to smoke'), saklu ('to fetch'), takbang ('to step') and tuki ('to accompany').

A few examples are: The language has also absorbed many Spanish loanwords due to the 333 years of presence of the Spaniards in the Kapampangan speaking provinces.

(this common expression can also be found in other Philippine Languages, such as Tagalog, Bisaya, Hiligaynon, etc.

[17] The first system (sulat Baculud, also known as tutung Capampangan or tutung Kapampangan in the sulat Wawa system) is based on Spanish orthography, a feature of which involved the use of the letters ⟨c⟩ and ⟨q⟩ to represent the phoneme /k/ (depending on the vowel sound following the phoneme).

The Spanish-based orthography is primarily associated with literature by authors from Bacolor and the text used on the Kapampangan Pasion.

This system was created by former Catholic priest Venancio Samson during the 1970s to translate the Bible into Kapampangan.