Lushootseed was historically spoken across southern and western Puget Sound roughly between modern-day Bellingham and Olympia by a number of Indigenous peoples.

[citation needed] The southern pronunciation txʷəlšucid is derived from the original by de-voicing d into t and switching the position of l and ə.

If taking the form of a negative of identity, a proclitic lə- must be added to the sentence on the next adverb.

[21] Almost all instances of a verb in Lushootseed (excluding the zero copula) carry a prefix indicating their tense and/or aspect.

The verb saxʷəb literally means 'to jump, leap, or run, especially in a short burst of energy', and is correctly used with ʔu-.

In contrast, the verb təlawil, which means 'to jump or run for an extended period of time', is used with lə-:lətəlawil čəxʷ.

There are five possessive affixes, derived from the pronouns: The third person singular -s is considered marginal and does not work with an actual lexical possessor.

[23] The language is spoken by many peoples in the Puget Sound region, including the Duwamish, Suquamish, Squaxin, Muckleshoot, Snoqualmie, Nisqually, and Puyallup in the south and the Snohomish, Stillaguamish, Upper Skagit, and Swinomish in the north.

Ethnologue quotes a source published in 1990 (and therefore presumably reflecting the situation in the late 1980s), according to which there were 60 fluent speakers of Lushootseed, evenly divided between the northern and southern dialects.

[6] On the other hand, the Ethnologue list of United States languages also lists, alongside Lushootseed's 60 speakers, 100 speakers for Skagit, 107 for Southern Puget Sound Salish, and 10 for Snohomish (a dialect on the boundary between the northern and southern varieties).

Linguist Marianne Mithun has collected more recent data on the number of speakers of various Native American languages, and could document that by the end of the 1990s there were only a handful of elders left who spoke Lushootseed fluently.

The language was extensively documented and studied by linguists with the aid of tribal elder Vi Hilbert, d. 2008, who was the last speaker with a full native command of Lushootseed.

Since 1996, the Tulalip Lushootseed Department has hosted the annual dxʷləšucid sʔəsqaləkʷ ʔə ti wiw̓suʔ, a summer language camp for children.

[1] It has been spoken during the annual Tribal Canoe Journeys that takes place throughout the Salish Sea.

[10] To facilitate the use of Lushootseed in electronic files, in 2008 the Tulalip Tribes contracted type designer Juliet Shen to create Unicode-compliant typefaces that met the needs of the language.

[26][27] The Nisqually tribe contracted the Language Conservancy to make a Lushootseed Keyboard for mobile devices.

Lushootseed was first taught on the Seattle campus in 1972 by Thom Hess, a linguistics professor, and the following year he turned over the class to Vi Hilbert, who would be the last native speaker.

In the summers of 2016 and 2017, an adult immersion program in Lushootseed was offered at the University of Washington's Tacoma campus.

It was sponsored by The Puyallup Tribal Language Program in partnership with University of Washington Tacoma and its School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences.

[30] Southern Lushootseed classes started in 2018 on the University of Washington's Seattle campus, taught by Tami Hohn, a Puyallup tribal member.

According to work published by Vi Hilbert and other Lushootseed-language specialists, Lushootseed uses a morphophonemic writing system meaning that it is a phonemic alphabet which does not change to reflect the pronunciation such as when an affix is introduced.

[34] Some older works based on the Dictionary of Puget Salish distinguishes between schwas that are part of the root word and those inserted through agglutination which are written in superscript.

The Lushootseed language originates from the coastal region of Northwest Washington State and the Southwest coast of Canada.

There are words in the Lushootseed language which are related to the environment and the fishing economy that surrounded the Salish tribes.