[6] Following the death of Cristina Calderón (1928–2022) of Villa Ukika on Navarino Island, Chile, no native speakers of Yahgan remain.

For instance, the terminal -i of teki 'to see, recognize' when affixed by -vnnaka 'to have trouble/difficulty doing' becomes -e:- of teke:vnnaka 'have trouble recognizing/seeing' In syllables reduced through morphophonetic processes, terminal vowels (-a, -u:) of original bisyllables will often drop (except for -i, which tends to remain, leaving previous material unaffected), and resultant final stops will fricativize (r becomes sh).

Present tense usually results in the dropping of the final vowel of the infinitival form of the verb and associated changes as above, as does affixation by many, but not all, further derivational and inflectional suffixes beginning with stops, affricates, and other consonants.

The vast majority of 'irregular' stress renderings in Bridges' original dictionary manuscript seem to arise from just these five sources.

-Vna itself will often lose stress and reduce to a tense vowel before other suffixes, leaving the shifting as a hint of its underlying presence.

Circumstantial T has different allomorphs- some having following stressable vowel, others not- this also complicates matters for the learner but may also help disentangle morpheme boundaries for the listener.

For example, many roots ending in -m encode as part of their senses the notion of a texturally softened positive curve (similar to -mp in such words as lump or hump in English), while an -l in similar position often shows up when the reference is to bloody core parts, often out from once safe confinement inside the body.

Many roots with initial ch- refer to repeated, spiny extrusions, final -x to dry, hard-edged, or brittle parts, and so on.

Several bird names are perhaps reduplications of calls (or other nonvocal behavior), and there are a couple of imitative cries and sound words.

A simplified orthography is a variant of the old Bridges system, created for online use on the Waata Chis discussion list on Yahoo Groups[10] and elsewhere.

In the system, tenseness is marked by colon (:) following the vowel sign: a, a:, ai, au, e, e:, i, i:, iu:, o, o:, oi, u, u:, v (pronounced as a schwa, not /v/), all corresponding to unique graphemes in the Bridges orthography.

The phonemes hm, hn, hl, hr, hw, and hy are used as well, and are digraphs in the earlier Bridges writings, but single graphemes in later ones.

Still later, Bridges made further orthographic modifications: w, h, and y became superscripts, and à is read as ya, á as ha, and ā as wa.

All of these changes took place in a very short time frame, and have led to substantial confusion on the part of later scholars.

In addition, Bridges' modifications of the 19th century phonetic alphabet of Alexander Ellis also included a number of signs meant for transliterations of foreign terms.

Further analysis of the biblical texts is showing that the Yahga dialect allowed for semantic reordering of constituents.

It will remain to be seen how pervasive this principle is in the language, and how intricately it interacts with Tense-Aspect-Mood and Polarity marking, topicalization, focus, etc.

The adverb kaia 'fast, quick(ly)' can be used lexically to modify predications, but in the three biblical texts it is also apparently used to mark the second component clause in 'if-then' types of constructions.

Grammaticalization is a historical linguistic process whereby regular lexical items shift function (and sometimes form) and become part of the grammar structure.

Yahgan has a system of verbs which denote the posture of an entity: 'stand' mvni, 'sit' mu:tu:, 'lie' (w)i:a and others (for instance a:gulu: 'fly/jump', kvna 'float' etc.).

While English has a plethora of colorful expressions for denoting such circumstances, Yahgan has reduced the system to a well-defined smallish set of terms from the domain of posture verbs.

Such contact/engagement-based semantic clines are relatively common cross-linguistically, and the phenomenon of posture verbs changing to aspect marking morphemes is well known among linguists, though it is not the only pathway to creating such terms.

It is possible that there may be historical connections between the y- form and ki:pa 'woman' and u:- and u:a 'man', which when verbalized apparently refer to less and more forceful or determined attempts to achieve respectively.

There are many fewer names for land animals and plants than one might expect based on what is found in other languages from other, richer natural environments.

Bound subject pronouns (ha- 1st, sa- 2nd, kv- 3rd), unmarked for number, are prefixed, coming before voice prefixes (such as ma(m)- passive, tu:- causative, u:- permissive, T- circumstantial (with allomorphs t-, tv-, tu:-, ts-, chi:-, chi-, ch-), l- back, in response to, etc.).

Tense suffixes seem to derive historically from horizontal motion verbs, and together with the more vertical postural aspect forms, make an interesting Cartesian-style coordinate system for dealing with the temporal dimension.

In the last example note that this seemingly suppletive present may in fact hark back to the original historical form, and infinitival kvna may be the changed one.

mvra also finds modal use in the clitic space that often follows the first substantive in the sentence: kvnjin MUSH yamana:mu:ta, kvndaian-da:gia kv-teki-sin-de: kvnjima hauanchi moala 'He MUST be alive, because they (the ones who told me about it) saw him today'.

On the other hand, Yahgan exhibits a good deal of remnant sound symbolism in the verb, similar to what one sees in English.

A good number of verbs seem to form small 'word families' which have slight semantic differences which may have been encoded using sound symbolism (as one often sees, for instance, in some languages of the Austroasiatic stock).