[8] Efforts are being made to restore the language to more common usage, such as the education of children, the publication of English–Norfuk dictionaries, the use of the language in signage, and the renaming of some tourist attractions – most notably the rainforest walk "A Trip Ina Stik" – to their Norfuk equivalents.

The Society of the Descendants of Pitcairn Islanders, founded in 1977, was a driving force behind the campaign to include Norfuk language as a teachable subject in schools.

The book Speak Norfuk Today was written by Alice Buffett and Dr Donald Laycock.

[11][4] In 2018, Eve Semple and colleagues received a grant from the Australian Research Council, in order to promote and facilitate revival.

[12] Norfuk is descended predominantly from the Pitkern (Pitcairnese or Pi'kern) spoken by settlers from the Pitcairn Islands.

The difficulties in accessing the Pitcairn population have meant that a serious comparison of the two languages for mutual intelligibility has proven difficult.

Norfuk has been classified as an Atlantic Creole language,[13] despite the island's location in the Pacific Ocean, because of the heavy influence of Ned Young, a Saint Kitts Creole-speaker, and his role as a "linguistic socializer" among the first generation of children born on Pitcairn.

Alice Buffett, a Norfolk Island parliamentarian and Australian-trained linguist, developed a codified grammar and orthography for the language in the 1980s, assisted by Dr Donald Laycock, an Australian National University academic.

[23] For example, many fish that are indigenous to the island were named either by the people who caught them or by whoever received them after dividing the catch.