[2] Few Tonkawa people speak the language, but revitalization is underway.

There are five types of syllable arrangements: (C: consonant, CC: consonant cluster, V: vowel) The orthography used on the Tonkawa Tribe's website is based on Americanist phonetic notation.

The phonemic orthography used in Hoijer's Tonkawa Texts is in a slightly different version of Americanist transcription.

It uses a colon for long vowels ⟨꞉⟩ and the IPA glottal stop letter ⟨ʔ⟩.

The stem is composed of two elements (the consonant and vowel) and modified by affixes.

This leads to the fusion of the stem and affix where it becomes difficult to isolate the word into its smaller units.

Enclitics In English, pronouns, nouns, verbs, etc., are individual words; Tonkawa forms the parts of speech differently, and the most important grammatical function is affixation.

This process shows the subjects, objects, and pronouns of words and/or verbs.

Verb suffixes are important in Tonkawa because they usually indicate the tense, negativity, and manner (outside of what is conveyed in the aforementioned prefixes) of the action performed.

Enclitics are bound morphemes that are suffixed to verbs, nouns, and demonstratives that end with -k. Enclitics often express modal concepts in Tonkawa, which occur in the declarative, interrogative, and quotative/narrative clauses or statements.