As of June 2021, only one speaker of the Nǀuu dialect remains, the rest of the population having shifted to Khoekhoe and Afrikaans.
As of 2010, most remaining speakers spoke Nǀuu dialect, and this was the name Nǁng appeared under when it was rediscovered.
The letter that looks like a vertical bar (sometimes substituted with a slash) represents a dental click like the English interjection tsk!
The language was mainly displaced by Afrikaans and Nama, especially after speakers started migrating to towns in the 1930s and found themselves surrounded by non-Nǁng-speaking people.
In 1973 their language was declared extinct, and the remaining Nǁnǂe ("ǂKhomani") were evicted from the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.
Vaalbooi came up with the Nǁng motto of Sa ǁʼa ǃainsi uinsi "We move towards a better life" for her rehabilitated people.
As of 2007, fewer than ten were still alive in South Africa, and a few more in Botswana; none live with another speaker, and their daily languages are Khoekhoe and Tswana, respectively.
In 2013 there were three speakers in the Upington area and two in Olifantshoek (ǁʼAu), speaking the western and eastern dialects, respectively.
[8] The first Nǁng children's book, !Qhoi n|a Tjhoi (Tortoise and Ostrich), was written by Katrina Esau, one of the two surviving speakers at the time, in May 2021.
[9] In June 2021, her brother Simon Sauls died, leaving 88-year-old Katrina Esau as the last speaker of the language.
[2] Esau had opened a school with her granddaughter to teach the language to children, but it was vandalized during the COVID pandemic and abandoned.
[3] In October 2022, the Dutch NOS referred to Esau, or "Oma Katrina", as the last speaker of Nǀuu.
She was teaching the language to a group of children, including her grandson and great-grandson, all speakers of Afrikaans.
That is, lexical roots, not counting sometimes lexicalized CV prefixes and suffixes, are typically CVcV, CVV, CVN, though there are also a few which are CV, as well as longer words of two phonological feet: CVCV, where the second C is not one of the reduced set of consonants but cannot be a click,[note 2] CVCVN, CVVCV, CVNCV, CVVCVN, CVNCVN, CVcVCV, CVVCVcV.
Nǁng is the only Khoisan language known to have a strident front vowel, /e𐞴/, though this is rare, occurring in only two known words, zeqe /zḛ̰́é/ 'to fly' and ǂʻheqbe /ᵑ̊ǂḛ̰̀βé/ 'man's loincloth'.
The lack of a nasalized equivalent is thought to be an accidental gap or simply unattested due to the small number of known words.
Front vowels can only follow the click types ǀ and ǂ (the back-vowel constraint), with a single known exception, [ᵑǁˀé] 'to go'.
A typical lexical word consists of two moras, and so may have a high (HH), low (LL), rising (LH), or falling (HL) tone.
CVV and CVN roots are HH, HL, and LH with about equal frequency, with LL slightly less common.