It is spoken in the Alice Springs area and taught in schools and universities, heard in media and used in local government.

Some of the other dialects are spoken by very few people, leading to efforts to revive their usage; others are now completely extinct.

"Aranda" is a simplified, Australian English approximation of the traditional pronunciation of the name of Arrernte [ˈarəɳ͡ɖa].

[32] There are two courses teaching Arrernte at tertiary level: at the Batchelor Institute and at Charles Darwin University.

These sounds arose as normal consonant clusters; Ladefoged states that they now occur initially, where consonant clusters are otherwise forbidden, due to historical loss of initial vowels;[37] however, it has also been argued that such words start with a phonemic schwa, which may not be pronounced (see below).

[38] The underlying syllable structure of Eastern/Central Arrernte is argued to be VC(C), with obligatory codas and no onsets.

Stress falls on the first nucleus preceded by a consonant, which by this analysis can be stated more uniformly as the second underlying syllable.

[36] Pronouns decline with a nominative rather than ergative alignment: Body parts normally require non-possessive pronouns (inalienable possession), though younger speakers may use possessives in this case too (e.g. akaperte ayenge or akaperte atyinhe 'my head').