[3] It is spoken in the southern Sierra Nevada, the Mono Basin, and the Owens Valley of central-eastern California.

Mono is most closely related to Northern Paiute; these two are classified as the Western group of the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.

[1] The Northfork Mono are developing a dictionary, and both they and the Big Sandy Rancheria provide language classes.

[10][11] Below is given the consonant phoneme inventory of Northfork Western Mono and Owens Valley Paiute as presented by Lamb (1958) and Liljeblad & Fowler (1986).

Mono is an agglutinative language, in which words use suffix complexes for a variety of purposes with several morphemes strung together.