Speaking Thao was criminalised under Japanese rule of Taiwan and later the Kuomintang regime, contributing to its critically endangered status today.

[5] A Thao-English dictionary by Robert A. Blust was published in 2003 by Academia Sinica's Institute of Linguistics.

[citation needed] Two elderly native speakers died in December of that year, including chief Tarma (袁明智), age 75.

Thao word order can be both SVO and VSO, although the former is derived from Taiwanese Hokkien (Blust 2003:228).

The perfect is marked by "iza", the past by an infix just after the primary onset consonant "-in-" and the future by the prefix "a-".