The two main dialects are Wüinpümüin and Wopumüin, spoken in the northeast and southwest of the peninsula, respectively.

There are minor vocabulary differences, but the main one is only related to the pronouns, and their respective prefixes.

It occurs in vowels next to nasal consonants or as an emphasizing feature of certain words such as aa "yes", ma'i "very" or eejuu "smell".

Nouns are expressed with a suffix that indicates the plural number (-kana) or the singular depending on whether it is masculine (-kai) or non-masculine (-kat).

[8] Demonstrative pronouns, for example, have a root that indicates whether it is masculine singular (chi-), not masculine singular (tü-) or plural (na-), which is used in the basic form to indicate the closest presence (this, this, these) and to which a suffix is added to indicate degrees of greater distance (-ra/ --la, -sa, -a/-ia/-ya), like this: this (masc.)

those far away The personal pronouns in Wayuunaiki are [5][7][9][10] shia/jia (she) Wayuunaiki uses personal prefixes derived from the pronouns, along with 3 extra non-pronoun derived prefixes (ka- - possessive, ma- - negative, pa- - dual (not commonly used)).

[9] The most common triad of suffixes in verbs is triad A (shi/sü/shii), the general time suffixes, also named as “present-past time”, where it combines the English and Spanish equivalents of the basic present and the basic past tense.

Whichever equivalent is being implied depends on the context of the situation, and sometimes can be interpreted or translated as a completely different tense, the present-continuous (named “future imminent” in the studies done over Wayuunaiki), which has its own suffix triad, using triad B and combining it with -i- (-ichi, -irü, -ina).

[9] Wayuunaiki is agglutinative, with the majority of ways of expressing aspect and mood being used with suffixes, attached to the end of a verb.

The latter form of this requires a suffix from triad F (chi, lü ~ rü, chii) to be added at the end of the new word.

A phonological shift occurs in the conjugation of active verbs whose infinitives end in laa, raa, loo and roo.

Two predication schemes are presented: a bifurcated predicate-subject one and a synthetic one, predicate-centered or compact,[13] in which the sentence is composed of only one phrase with a verbal nucleus.

Conjugation is done through personal prefixes, infixes and suffixes of mode, time and aspect and number-gender of the object.

[14] Wayuunaiki itself comes from wayuu 'human being/people' and the suffix -naiki, from anüiki 'speech' ('word' or 'language'), literally meaning '[the] people’s speech'.