In January 1997, the last native speaker of the language, a woman named Vyjye (Valentina Wye) (Russian: Выйе), died.

[6][7][8] Ever since that point, the language has been extinct;[6] nowadays, all Sirenik Eskimos speak Siberian Yupik or Russian.

[10][11] This article is based on Menovschikov (1964),[12] with cited examples transliterated from Cyrillic transcription to the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In fact, the exact genealogical classification of Sireniki language is not settled yet,[7] and some others regard it belonging to the Yupik branch.

[24] This difference from all their language relatives may be the result of a supposed long isolation from other Eskimo groups:[25][26] Sireniki Eskimos may have been in contact only with speakers of unrelated languages for many centuries in the past, influenced especially by non-relative Chukchi.

Although morphology will be treated grouped into a nominal and a verbal part, many Eskimo languages show features which “crosscut” any such groupings in several aspects: Some grammatical categories (e.g. person and number) are applicable to both verbal and nominal lexical categories.

This notion concerns also other concepts in building larger parts of the sentence and the text, see section #Usage of third person suffixes.

Although other Eskimo languages know more than the familiar two grammatical numbers, by having also dual, Sireniki uses only singular and plural.

Sireniki is, as mentioned above, peculiar in this aspect, alongside Greenlandic, within the Eskimo–Aleut language family,[21] with even its neighboring Siberian Yupik relatives having dual number.

[22] Sireniki had an unusual wide range of deictic distinctions between up to four distances (near, medial, far and out_of_view) which could be horizontal “una”>”igna”>”ikna”, vertical “mana”>”unygna”>”pikna”, marking a movement like approaching the speaker “ukna”, away from them “agna”, refer to conversational topics be they definite “ugna”>”k’amna”>oov “amna” or indefinite “k’akymna”>”k’agna”>oov “akymna” or describe sth in the past “imna”.

Suffixes can express grammatical moods of the verb (e.g. imperative, interrogative, optative), and also negation, tense, aspect, the person of subject and object.

Some examples (far from being comprehensive): The rich set of morphemes makes it possible to build huge verbs whose meaning could be expressed (in most of widely known languages) as whole sentences (consisting of more words) .

Sireniki – like the other Eskimo languages – has polysynthetic and incorporative features, in many forms, among others polypersonal agreement.

The polysynthetic and incorporative features mentioned above manifest themselves in most of the ways Sirenik language can express grammatical categories.

In an analogous way, in Sireniki Eskimo language, the "dependent action" (expressed by the adverbial participle in the sentence element called adverbial, or expressed by the adjectival participle in the sentence element called attribute) relates somehow to the “main action” (expressed by the verb in the sentence element called predicate), and the participles will be listed below grouped by this relation (or by other meanings beyond this, e.g. modality).