Almost all published research on the language has been the work of Lawrence E. Clark of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
More recent studies of Sayula Popoluca have been conducted by Dennis Holt (lexico-semantics) and Richard A. Rhodes (morphology and syntax), but few of their findings have been published.
Popoluca is the Castilian alteration of the Nahuatl word popoloca, meaning 'barbarians' or 'people speaking a foreign language'.
Sayula Popoluca verbs are inflected for person and number of subject and object, for aspect, and for the difference between independent and dependent.
Sayula Popoluca marks agreement in transitive clause in an inverse system (Tatsumi, 2013).