It is mutually intelligible with other varieties of the Western Desert language, and is particularly closely related to the Yankunytjatjara dialect.

There is a Pitjantjatjara dictionary, and the New Testament of the Bible has been translated into the language, a project started at the Ernabella Mission in the early 1940s and completed in 2002.

The Ernabella Mission was established by Charles Duguid and the Presbyterian Church of Australia in 1937 at the location now known as Pukatja, supported by the South Australian government.

[6][7] The first draft of the New Testament's Gospel of Mark, Tjukurpa Palja Markaku, was completed in 1945 by Reverend Bob Love and Ronald Trudinger at the Mission, and was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1949.

[9] 21st-century Bible Society missionary and local teacher since 1973, Paul Eckert, has worked with elders on the project for many years.

[9] APY lands schools taught a bilingual curriculum until the late 1980s, when the programs were defunded, and teaching reverted to English only.

Like other Indigenous languages, some older loan words that are still commonly used in Pitjantjatjara derive from English terms that are now uncommon or obsolete.

For example, among schoolchildren, the predominant language used in the classroom and on the playground is English, though Pitjantjatjara is occasionally used in both settings (more so the latter than the former).

Pitjantjatjara uses case marking to show the role of nouns within the clause as subject, object, location, etc.

Pitjantjatjara is a language with split ergativity, since its nouns and pronouns show different case marking patterns.

It also has systematic ways of changing words from one part of speech to another: making nouns from verbs, and vice versa.