The pre-contact Maidu peoples lived in a hunting and gathering society in parts of central California.

Shipley's orthography is listed in brackets when it differs from the IPA transcription.

These six vowels are characterized by several different allophones depending on the phonetic environments in which they occur (initial/noninitial, stressed/unstressed, and open/closed syllables).

The base phone of the vowels occurs in initial open syllables with stress.

The lowest and most central allophones occur in unstressed closed syllables.

The syllables in Maidu follow a basic CV or CVC structure.

The majority of words consist of alternating consonants and vowels, while combinations such as CVCVCCV also occur.

Syllables with the primary stress in the word have a higher pitch and tend to be more tense and have longer vowels.

Secondary stress occurs with a low to middle pitch and lengthening of the vowel.

The stem /kyle/ 'woman' is notable in that is usually occurs as /kyle/, but may alternate to /kylok/ when attached with suffixes to form 'old woman' and 'women.'

These include in a noun construction ('that woman' for 'her'), singularly ('that one') and repeated ('that person').

Other than /maj/, there are no special plural forms of the pronouns, as they are inflected for number along with other nouns.

Maidu verbs consist of the verbal theme along a series of suffixes.

Similar to nouns, the verb stems in Maidu result from several different sources.

All thematic suffixes are optional, and thus may be excluded from the verb, with the base stem acting as the theme on its own.

The causative suffix /ti/ indicates that the actor is causing an action to occur, as in ma dondom 'as te 'ynotik'as, which means 'I walked the child, holding his hand' or 'I caused the child to walk, holding (his) hand.'

This occurs in c'ani majse 'ono wojomak'as 'I'm going to hit them (one after another) on the head with a stick,' and humbotmenwet 'as hesbopajodom 'I kept on shoving anything into the sack.'

These suffixes mark the verb for expression of tense, aspect, mode, person, and number.

There are five possible inflections for mode: indicative, subjunctive, optative, interrogative, and gerundial.

The past punctual indicative, marked simple with /'/, is a rare verb tense.

This form refers to a single act in the past that is disconnected from the current context.

The monitive optative, marked with /y'y/, indicates a possible future event that is unpleasant or undesirable in nature, such as wonoby'ys 'I might die'.

The imperative mode is marked by several different morphemes, depending on how the action is to be carried out.

These connections can only occur with a single pair of words, one Possessive plus the Subject, Object, or Locative.

The Subject and Locative may occur within an expanded verb phrase, making Verb-Subject-Object and Adverb-Locative-Verb potential sentence constructions.

-mymthatSUBJECTmajdym-kak'an-nik'iman-is-myVERBheskymfriendSUBJECT-mym majdym-kak'an-nik'i heskymthat man-is-my friendSUBJECT VERB SUBJECT'That man is my friend.