The long mid vowels /eː øː oː/ are realized as diphthongs when stressed: they are [ie uø uo], respectively.

Syllable structure is CVC, i.e. up to one consonant can occur at the beginning or end of a word and up to two in the middle.

[8][9][10][11] Both Yukaghir languages have residual vowel harmony and a complex phonotactics of consonants, rich agglutinative morphology and are strictly head-final.

Case assignment for core participants behaves in a broadly split-intransitive manner, though actual assignment is very complex, involving semantic role, focus, relative animacy of the participants (first or second person versus third), and nature of the noun itself.

Oblique cases include dative, instrumental, comitative, locative, ablative, prolative, and transformative, the latter indicating the intended use or function of an argument.