The federally recognized tribe has been working to encourage revival of use of the language by intensive classes locally and partnerships with universities.

The Ojibwa, their neighbors to the north who are one of the Anishinaabe peoples and also speak an Algonquian language, also use this term for them.

The main characteristics of Menominee, as compared to other Algonquian languages, are its extensive use of the low front vowel /æ/, its rich negation morphology, and its lexicon.

Some scholars (notably Bloomfield and Sapir) have classified it as a Central Algonquian language based on its phonology.

Good sources of information on the Menominee tribe and their language include Leonard Bloomfield's 1928 bilingual text collection, his 1962 grammar (considered a landmark study), and Skinner's earlier anthropological work.

[6] In the 21st century, residents of the Menominee reservation at Keshena have held intensive classes for learners of all ages, and have worked with linguists from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to document the language and to develop curriculum and learning materials.

[16][17] In 2012, the Catholic Diocese of Green Bay issued an apology to "a seventh-grader who was punished after using her native Menominee language in the classroom" in Shawano, Wisconsin.

[18][19] As of 2013, there are "six or seven people ... able to be conversational in the language," according to an article on the Menominee Place Names Map, a collaborative project at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point.

Primary stress occurs on every long vowel or diphthong that is in the next-to-last syllable of a word.

In an interrogative sentence which uses a question word, there is a rising and then falling of pitch near the beginning and a drop at the end.

Bloomfield states there are five overarching categories in Menominee: noun, pronoun, negator, verb, and particle.

[22] Agreement morphology in Menominee can be fusional, e.g. animacy and number (nouns), are indicated within the same affix.

These affixes are used to indicate possession (e.g. neme:h 'my older sister'; neta:qsɛnem, 'my stone').