[8] Nonetheless, the Natisone Valley dialect and standard Slovene are easily mutually intelligible.

Accent is on the same syllable as in Alpine Slavic, which is different from Standard Slovene, which has undergone *ženȁ → *žèna and optionally *məglȁ → *mə̀gla shifts (e. g. NV žená, SS žéna 'wife').

[12] Similarly to standard Slovene, the Natisone Valley dialect also has diacritics to denote accent.

[11] The Natisone Valley dialect has 24 (in the east 25) distinct phonemes, in comparison to 22 in standard Slovene.

This is mostly due to the fact that it still has palatal /ɲ/, /ʎ/, and /tɕ/, which depalatalized in standard Slovene, merging with the hard consonants.

The phonology of the Natisone Valley dialect is similar to that of standard Slovene, but it has a seven-vowel[15] (eastern microdialects eight-vowel)[16] system; two of those are diphthongs.The Natisone Valley dialect experienced lengthening of non-final vowels, and these became undistinguishable from their long counterparts, except for *ò.

The only more common feature is loss of final -i, but even this is not the case in some more remote villages, such as Montemaggiore (Matajur) and Stermizza (Strmica).

There is also a masculine j-stem, as well as the remains of the feminine v-stem and neuter s-, t-, and n-stems.

Lexemes from Proto-Slavic developed relatively similarly to those in Standard Slovene, and so both varieties are mutually intelligible.

Standard orthography, used in almost all situations, uses only the letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet plus ⟨č⟩, ⟨š⟩, ⟨ž⟩, and ⟨ǧ⟩:[19] /a/ /ă/ zastonj 'for free' zavaržen 'thrown away' [zasˈtɔːɲ] zastònj [zaˈvăɾʒɛn] zavȧržen /t͡ɕ/ ardeč 'red' [aɾˈdɛːt͡ɕ] ardèč /ɛ/ /ɛ̆/ sparjet 'stuck' tešč 'having empty stomach' [spaɾˈjɛt] sparjèt [tɛ̆ʃt͡ʃ] tėšč /ɡ/ gjandola 'gland' [ˈgjaːndɔla] gjàndola /i/ lizat 'to lick' [liˈzaːt] lizàt /ɔ/ /ɔ̆/ lenoba 'lazy person' trop 'herd' [lɛnɔˈba] lenobá [ˈtɾɔ̆p] trȯp /u/ /ŭ/ /u̯/ opudan 'at noon' saku 'falcon' debeu 'fat' [ɔpuˈdaːn] opudàn [saˈkŭ] saku̇ [dɛˈbɛu̯] debèu The orthography thus underdifferentiates several phonemic distinctions: The Natisone Valley dialect is unregulated, and thus a fair degree of variation is common in both pronunciation and writing.

The main reason for different spellings is akanye, which is more common in some microdialects and less in others; e.g., the word for 'bonfire' can either be written as kries or krias.