It is spoken throughout the Rio Negro region among the Baniwa, Baré and Warekena people, mainly in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the state of Amazonas, Brazil.

In the Baixo Tapajós and the state of Pará, it is being revitalized by the people of the region, such as the Borari and the Tupinambá,[5] and also among the riverside dwellers themselves.

Over time, the term "Tupinamba" was used to describe groups that were "linguistically and culturally related", even though the original people almost disappeared.

Taking personal pronouns as an example, see a comparison between Brazilian Portuguese, Old Tupi, and Nheengatu: Brazilian philologist specialized in Nheengatu, Eduardo de Almeida Navarro, argues that Yengatu, with its current characteristics, would only have emerged in the 19th century, as a natural evolution of the Northern General Language (NGL).

[citation needed] Belonging to the Tupi-Guarani linguistic family, Nheengatu emerged in the 18th century, descending from the now-extinct Amazonian Tupinambá, a regional Tupi variant that originated in the Odisseia Tupínambá.

The exodus of that nation that, fleeing from Portuguese invaders on the Bahia coast, entered the Amazon and settled first in Maranhão, and from there to the bay of Guajará (Belém), the mouth of the Tapajós river to the Tupinambarana island (Parintins), between the borders of Pará and Amazonas.

An anonymous manuscript from the 18th century is emblematically titled "Dictionary of the general language of Brazil, spoken in all the towns, places, and villages of this vast State, written in the city of Pará, year 1771".

The second ban on the language came right after this revolution better known as Cabanagem or War of the Cabanos, and when the rebels were defeated (1860), the Brazilian government imposed a harsh persecution of the speakers of Nheengatu.

Half of the male population of Grão-Pará (Amazon) was murdered and anyone who was caught speaking in Nheengatu was punished and if they were not contacted indigenous, they were baptized by priests and received their surnames on certificates, since the priests themselves were their godparents, this resulted in people of indigenous origin with Portuguese surnames without even being heirs to colonists.

Also in the 20th century, due to economic and political events, such as the Amazon Rubber boom (coming from huge waves of settlers from the Northeast, encouraged by the government, to the Amazon), the presence was felt again due to these events, forcing indigenous peoples to move or be subjected to forced labor.

Nheengatu remained mainly among the most distant inhabitants of the urban centers, in the families descended from the cabanos and among unconquered peoples.

Nheengatu is spoken in the Alto Rio Negro region, in the state of Amazonas, in the Brazilian Amazon and in neighboring parts of Colombia and Venezuela.

It is also an instrument of ethnic affirmation of Amazonian indigenous peoples who have lost their native languages, such as Barés, Arapaços, Baniuas, Uarequenas and others.

In December 2002, Nheengatu gained official language status alongside Portuguese in the municipality of São Gabriel da Cachoeira in accordance with local law 145/2002.

The legal text has already been sanctioned by Mayor Salomão de Araújo Souza, who is a descendant of indigenous peoples”.

As in the municipality of Monsenhor Tabosa, the number of indigenous people and descendants from the Northeast try to learn the language not only because they think it is beautiful, but because it has "always been" part of the native regional culture.

There have been studies done at each phase of its evolution, but much has been focused on how aspects of Nheengatu, such as its grammar or phonology, have changed upon contact over the years.

She also studied the rise of number agreement in modern Nheengatu, by analyzing how grammaticalization occurred over the course of its evolution from Tupinambá (Cruz 2015).

[14] Lima and Sirvana (2017) provides a sociolinguistic study of Nheengatu in the Pisasu Sarusawa community of the Baré people, in Manaus, Amazonas.

In this study, Moore focused on the effects of language contact, and how Nheengatu evolved over the years with the help of a Nheengatu-speaking informant.

[6] Anthropological research has been done on the changing cultural landscapes along the Amazon, as well as life of the Tupinambá people and their interactions with the Jesuits.

[6] There are eight word classes in Nheengatu: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, postpositions, pronouns, demonstratives and particles.

In the section on lexical classes, Cruz discusses personal pronominal prefixes, nouns and their subclasses (including personal, anaphoric and demonstrative pronouns as well as relative nouns), verbs and their subclasses (such as stative, transitive and intransitive verbs) and adverbial expressions.

Examples of verbal prefixes: i)  a-puraki1sg-work‘I work.’ii)  a-mũỹã1sg-makeI make (an object).’i) a-puraki ii) a-mũỹã{} 1sg-work {} 1sg-make{} {‘I work.’} {} {I make (an object).’}In these examples from Moore (2014), the verbal first person singular prefix a- is added to the intransitive verb for 'work' and transitive verb for 'make' respective.

The speakers of Içana and the upper region of the Rio Negro use Nheengatu as their main language, and reduplication occurs in the stative verbs, expressing intensity of a property, and the plural word ita doesn't necessarily need to be used.

On the other hand, in Santa Isabel do Rio Negro and the more urban area of São Gabriel da Cachoeira, speakers tend to be bilingual, with Portuguese used as the main language.