As of 2023, it only has a single fluent speaker, Kamala Khatri Sen,[3] although there are efforts underway to keep the language alive.

The little material that could be gleaned from the memories of former speakers suggested that the language was an isolate, but, without much evidence, it was often classified along with its neighbors as Tibeto-Burman.

However in 2004 three Kusundas, Gyani Maya Sen, Prem Bahadur Shahi and Kamala Singh,[5] were brought to Kathmandu for help with citizenship papers.

There, members of Tribhuvan University discovered that one of them, a native of Sakhi VDC in southern Rolpa District, was a fluent speaker of the language.

[7] The sisters, together with author and researcher Uday Raj Aaley, have been teaching the language to interested children and adults.

[8] Aaley, the facilitator and Kusunda-language teacher, has written the book Kusunda Tribe and Dictionary.

[10] He argued that Kusunda is indeed a language isolate, not just genealogically but also lexically, grammatically and phonologically distinct from its neighbors.

There are a few words with no uvular consonants that still bar such dual pronunciations, though these generally only feature the distinction in careful enunciation.

[13] Below are some Proto-Kusunda lexical reconstructions from Spendley (2024),[13] based on data of different Kusunda dialects from Hodgson (1857) and Reinhard & Toba (1970).