The Wintun family of languages was spoken in the Shasta County, Trinity County, Sacramento River Valley and in adjacent areas up to the Carquinez Strait of San Francisco Bay.

But instead of conditioning the location of the syllables like the plus juncture, the hyphen shifts the pitch and the stress.

It has two phonetic features: a fully realised pause accompanied or preceded by glottal stricture.

A vast number of phonological processes occur in the Wintu language.

In a similar way, the glottalized velar /qʼ/ is pronounced with more friction at the point of articulation as /qʼˣ/.

The combination of its morphemes into words involves several processes such as suffixation, prefixation, compounding, reduplication and consonant and vocalic ablaut.

An example of dissimilation takes place when the morphophoneme [V]assimilates completely to the quality of the vowel that precedes in the previous syllable.

A small amount of consonant ablaut is also present in Wintu, for example before word juncture /cʼ/ and /b/ change in /p/.

There are two different types of substantives: those formed directly from roots (pronouns, non-possessed nouns, kinship terms) and those based on forms of complex derivation from radical and stems (mostly nouns).

They have particular suffixes (possessive for instrumental functions and for marking plural humans.)

Nouns have a variety of roots, they are an open class, they may show number in rare forms and they do not distinguish possessive from instrumental functions.

Pitkin (1964) identifies three stem forms: indicative, imperative and nominal.

Sentences are considered a sequences of full words terminated by a period juncture /./.

Four types of functions can be distinguished for the sentences: head, attributive, satellite, and conjunction.

The attributive preceded and modify the head as for example in /winthuꞏn qewelin/ in a Wintu house.

For example: /sedet ʔelew'kiyemtiꞏn/ coyote never speaks wisely, or /wayda meꞏm hina/ a northern flood of water (will) arrive.