They live in three communities called Palenques in the northern area of Costa Rica: Margarita, Tonjibe and El Sol.
At the 2000 census, 71.1% of the members of the ethnic group declared themselves to speak the language, but only 49% considered it as the mother tongue.
According to this institution, children attending schools in the region of Guatuso receive bilingual instruction in Maléku and Spanish.
According to Espinoza Romero, Mejía Marín & Ovares Barquero 2011, the school, traditionally an acculturation mechanism, has not contributed to strengthening the Maléku identity.
[2] Sánchez (1984) affirms that the vowel system of the Maleku is similar to Spanish (apart from length contrast); he cites some words with unlike VV sequences but is unclear if these are single nuclei or V.V.
Smith Sharp (1979) argues for V.V with an optional desyllabification of high vowels to approximants [w, j], in agreement with Costenla Umaña (1983).
The examples given suggest there may be role for morphological structure and vowel length in predicting stress placement.
Smith Sharp (1979: 42) states En maleku, hay una sola oposición de acento.
The traditional consonant system of the Maleku includes fifteen phonemes:[2] Sánchez (1984) reports /t/ as 'dental-alveolar' and other coronals as 'alveolar'.
Influence from Spanish has added voiced stops and /ɲ/ to the modern colloquial language; these are not included in the inventories of Sánchez (1984), Smith Sharp (1983) or in the text counts of Krohn (2017).
Sánchez (1984) gives 2 examples of word-internal CC codas /rɸ, rp/ in /irp-tʃia, irɸ-laŋ/ "drink it, eat it" and suggests CVCC as max syllable, but such examples are described as the result of an optional loss of a vowel in the 2nd person ergative prefix /riɸa/ by Costenla Umaña (1983: 18) Canonical Form: