Since 1949, there have been efforts to revitalize the language and increase the number of speakers led by linguists such as Dr. William Bright and Susan Gehr, as well as members of the Karuk community.

[8] The Karuk people originally owned 1.04 million acres of land until it was claimed as public territory in 1905 under the Forest Reserve Act during the Roosevelt administration.

[4] Karuk also lacks secondary articulation to its consonants such as glottalization or labialization, also unusual for a Californian language.

A comparison between these conventions follows: In two-consonant sequences [sh] or [th] are distinguished from the digraphs ⟨sh th⟩ which represent the single phonemes /ʃ θ/ with the use of a hyphen ⟨s-h t-h⟩.

"[13]: 41 Karuk is similar to many other American Indian Languages in showing "a complex person-marking system, where subject and object are marked in portmanteau prefixes" [4] on its verbs.

[14] Karuk uses prefixes and suffixes in a way William Bright relates to how English words snort, sniff, and sneeze all start with a sn-.

Bright later worked with Susan Gehr, a tribe member and fellow linguist, on a Karuk dictionary, which was published in 2005.

[18] They recorded everyday conversations, songs, stories, and poetry of fluent Karuk speakers to attempt to capture the language and what it meant to those speaking it.

[18] Bright spent over fifty years studying, researching, and documenting Karuk, and is the only non-Indian to be inducted as an honorary member of the tribe thanks to his contributions to the community.

[20] These teachers were bilingual in their tribe's native language as well as English, and would be employed in local public schools to teach American Indian children.

Bilingual teachers in both Karuk and English would teach at Orleans and Happy Camp Elementary Schools, where children would learn how to live in America while keeping their identity.

The committee, composed of eight volunteers, drafted a 5-year minimum plan in an attempt to preserve the Karuk language and help it regain its standing in the community.

[21] The committee was advised by Dr. William Bright and tribal member Julian Lang, a dedicated researcher of the language.

Their studies suggest that the decline of the language is caused by a combination of a lack of younger fluent speakers, a decline in the number of speakers, not being typically taught at home at young ages, a feeling of disconnect between its use and the contemporary world, and the lack of literacy in the language among tribal members.

[21] The committee ultimately created a five-step plan:[21] An immersion method called the master-apprentice program was started in 1992 by Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival to aid in Karuk revitalization efforts.