The remarks below use the orthography used by the Pascua Yaqui Tribe in the United States.

There are minor differences in the sounds of Mexican and American dialects, the latter tending to exclude an intervocalic "r" and final "k".

Long vowels may change tone, but that is not represented in the written language.

The following consonantal sounds are present in Yaqui: b, ch, (d), (f), (g), h, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, y, and one or two glottal stops (IPA /ʔ/), represented by an apostrophe.

That appears to be intrinsic to Yaqui, rather than from the influence of Spanish, which has a similar feature.

Also, "d", "f", and "g" are present only in English and Spanish loanwords and are substituted with the native sounds "t"/"r"/"l", "p", and "w"/"k", respectively.

The phone [w] is present in Spanish not as an independent consonantal phoneme but as a variant of the vowel /u/ and the consonant /g/ when it is before a /u/ or /o/.

There also appears to be a "fainter" glottal stop that is sometimes used between vowels but with apparently little predictability.

One word, laute, has two contradictory meanings in translation into English: "quickly" and "slowly".

"The following sentences display a variation of the language's structure and the forms allowed.

[2] néeI(SUBJ)ʹáaableHi-máʹakoINTR-chopTépwa-m-meaAxe-ACC:PL-INST(OBJ)née ʹáa Hi-máʹako Tépwa-m-meaI(SUBJ) able INTR-chop Axe-ACC:PL-INST(OBJ)I am able to chop with an axe.The following is an additional example that shows variant in word order than previously seen— OSV.

[2] ʹinMymalá-be-umother-CONN-to(OBJ)neI(SUBJ)wáateremember(V)ʹin malá-be-u ne wáateMy mother-CONN-to(OBJ) I(SUBJ) remember(V)I remember my mother.Yaqui is a "noun-heavy" agglutinative language.

For example, the first person singular pronoun "in" or "ne" (which varies by dialect), is more often used in the form "inepo", which can be translated "within me".

InepoIhaamuchimwomenvichulook atInepo haamuchim vichuI women {look at}Usually, adding the suffix "-k" to a verb indicates past tense, though there are many exceptions.

[2] The following is a table on the various tense markers that act more as aspectual values and epistemic states.

The following formula of four phrases is often used even among close friends: [4] In 2009, the Pascua Yaqui Tribal Council and the University of Arizona collaborated on a program in which tribal elders teach the Yaqui language to families.

[5] As of 2010, a revitalization project was underway at the university, "using 30 year old audio tapes recorded by tribal member Maria Leyva.