[5] Natively, speakers refer to the language as Nuntajɨyi, which means "true word," and themselves as Nundajɨypappɨc.
Nahuatl and Spanish are also spoken in nearby areas, and have influenced Sierra Popoluca through language contact.
[7] Two Sierra Popoluca spellings have been developed, one by the SIL international and another by the Academia Veracruzana de las Lenguas Indígenas.
These consonants are considered "restricted" because the only words they appear in are either ideophones, Spanish borrowings, or stylistic alterations.
Words containing examples of each syllable structure are given in the table below:[14] Sierra Popoluca has phonotactic restrictions on both onset and coda clusters.
Words containing examples of each stress paradigm are given in the table below:[16] Sierra Popoluca is an agglutinating, polysynthetic language whose morpheme inventory is primarily inflectional and consists of roughly an equal number of clitics and suffixes, with no prefixes.
[23] Examples of various proclitics are given in the table below: exclusive inclusive Sierra Popoluca has nine enclitics, six of which are adverbial, two of which are inflectional, and one of which is a relativizer.
[30] Though generally used to convey intensity or frequency, reduplication can also express "a sense of wandering around repeating an action"[30] when paired with the ambulative suffix -ʔoʔy.
[31] Various examples of reduplication are given in the table below: Compounding is observed in all word classes in Sierra Popoluca and is highly productive.
A few examples of these structures are given below:[41] diablodevilʔi+jos3POSS+holediablo ʔi+josdevil 3POSS+hole‘devil's hole (hell)’püüxinymanmoj-Wbegin-COMPLØ+wej-i3ABS+cry-DEPpüüxiny moj-W Ø+wej-iman begin-COMPL 3ABS+cry-DEP‘The man began to cry.’ʔi+ʔix-W+tyi+ʔam3ERG+see-COMPL+just+IAMʔiga+ʔüchCOMP+1PROdyaNEGʔan+joʔy-kaʔ-W1ERG:EXCL+be.angry-INSTR-COMPLʔi+ʔix-W+tyi+ʔam ʔiga+ʔüch dya ʔan+joʔy-kaʔ-W3ERG+see-COMPL+just+IAM COMP+1PRO NEG 1ERG:EXCL+be.angry-INSTR-COMPL‘He saw that I wasn't angry.’Nouns in Sierra Popoluca can be modified by determiners, adjectives, quantifiers, possessors, and relative clauses.