In 2011, the San Carlos Apache Tribe's Language Preservation Program in Peridot, Arizona, began its outreach to the "14,000 tribal members residing within the districts of Bylas, Gilson Wash, Peridot and Seven Mile Wash",[5] only 20% of whom still speak the language fluently.

[7] All Western Apache narratives are spatially anchored to points upon the land, with precise depictions of specific locations, which is characteristic of many Native American languages.

"[7] According to Basso, the Western Apache practice of "speaking with names" expresses functional range and versatility.

"[7] He notes that though many elders in Western Apache communities, such as Cibecue, share this knowledge, younger generations of Western Apache "are ignorant of both placenames and traditional narratives in increasing numbers," which makes engaging in the practice of "speaking with names" incredibly difficult.

[7] Keith Basso, a prominent Western Apache linguist, writes that the ancestors frequently traveled for food, and the need to remember specific places was "facilitated by the invention of hundreds of descriptive placenames that were intended to depict their referents in close and exact detail.

For example, they use place names to explain what happened to them: If there is a story linked to the location, they can relate to it or use it as a warning.

Willem de Reuse explains, "Unaffricated stop consonants are produced in three locations: bilabial, alveolar, velar.

The voiceless unaspirated alveolars are characteristically realized as taps in intervocalic environments other than stem-initial position.

"[13] The use of classificatory verbs is similar to that of nouns: the speaker must select an expression that corresponds to the situation in the world he wishes to refer to.

Basso gives these examples of classifications for the Western Apache verb system: There are two features on this dimension: "animal" and "non-animal."

The second feature refers to moist, plastic substances such as mud, wet clay, etc., and might also have been defined as "neither solid nor liquid."