It is spoken by the inhabitants of the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan, parts of Gilgit-Baltistan (the former NAs) of Pakistan, the Gorno-Badakhshan region of Tajikistan, and Xinjiang in Western China.

In the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, the Wakhi people mainly live in Gojal, Ishkoman, and Darkut, as well as in Chitral District's Broghol.

They live in parts of Wakhan in Afghanistan, Gorno-Badakhshan in Tajikistan, and the Taxkorgan Tajik Autonomous County in China, Russia, and Turkey.

[5] In Tajikistan, the Wakhi and other communities that speak one of the Pamir languages refer to themselves as Pamiri or Badakhshani, and there has been a movement to separate their identity from that of the majority of Persian-speaking Tajiks.

[6] In Gilgit-Baltistan, Wakhi is spoken in the sparsely populated upper portions of five of the northernmost valleys: Hunza, Gojal, Ishkoman, Yasin, Gupis, and Yarkhun.

In Yasin, they live mainly in the vicinity of Darkot, and in Yarhkun, they are found in Baroghil and a few other small villages in the high, upper portion of the valley.

In 2000, the WCA won a "Best Programme" organizer award in the Silk Road Festival from the President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf.

Wakhi people live in 4 countries, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and China, and are in contact with speakers of various other languages.

However, due to the pluricentric nature of Wakhi dialects, marginalization in favour of a more significant national/regional language, remoteness, and political instability, no one orthographic standard has managed to rise to the level of a singular unifying writing system.

Meaning that, for example, the phoneme [ɔ], which is equivalent to Iranian Persian[ɒː] after having undergone a chain shift, is not written with alef "آ / ا /ا ـا‎", but with the letter waw "او / و / ـو‎".

Zaroubine and V. S. Sokolova, and further developed by A.L Grünberg and I.M Stéblinn-Kamensky in the early 1960s:[14][15] Sample text from a Bible translation published in 2001 is shown here below:[15] The Wakhi lexicon exhibits significant differences with the other Pamir languages.