Rarámuri is spoken by 70,000 or more Indigenous Mexicans living in the state of Chihuahua.

There is no consensus among specialists on the number of dialects: competing proposals include two (Western and Eastern);[4] four (Western, Northern, Southern, Eastern);[5] and five, according to field surveys conducted in the 1990s by linguists working for the Mexican government[6] and Ethnologue.

The five divisions tentatively recognized by the Mexican government are not the same ones proposed by Ethnologue.

The landscape of the area is dominated almost entirely by the Sierra Madre Occidental, a mountain range in western Mexico.

The five dialects recognized by Ethnologue, with Ethnologue's own current designations and population estimates, are Western (40,000 speakers); Central (55,000, including 10,000 monolinguals); Northern (300); Southeastern (no estimate given); and Southwestern (100).

[8] Historian Manuel Orozco y Berra identified four dialects: Varohio, Guazapare, Pachera, and Tubar.

Additionally, [ə] occurs as an allophone of /a/ word-initially and between a stressed close vowel and the glottal stop.

[14] Some important phonological rules:[15] The following description is based on Burgess (1984) unless otherwise noted.

The imperfect, conditional, passive voice, plural and singular imperative, and past participle are all marked for with suffixes as well.

Rarámuri utilizes valence changing processes that will most often transitivize verbs.

The process of applicativization involves a suffix and prefix, as well a change in voicing for the root-initial bilabial consonant.

If there are indirect objects, temporal makers, or locative markers, these typically come after the verb.

In order to add still more "emphasis" to a word that already has emphatic particles, the postposition /-pa/ can be added.

There also exists a construction that masks itself as a relative clause, but is really a repetition of the subject of the sentence.

This syntactic style is not unique to Rarámuri, but rather, it can be found in many other Uto-Aztecan languages, notably Nawa.

Rarámuri language programming is carried by the CDI's radio station XETAR, broadcasting from Guachochi, Chihuahua.