The speakers of Southern Pomo were never a unified political group; rather, they were spread across a number of villages and spoke slightly different dialects.

Only the northernmost populations of Southern Pomo speakers, those of the Dry Creek and Cloverdale dialects, survived to be recorded by the time linguists began to collect data on the language.

At least four modern rancherias (the California term for small Indian reservations) include members whose ancestral language was Southern Pomo: Dry Creek, Cloverdale, Lytton and Graton.

In 2012 there was one fluent speaker, from Dry Creek, one rememberer, and a handful of people who learned some vocabulary as children.

Southern Pomo has a rich sound system with aspirated, unaspirated, ejective and voiced stops.