degree of speakers' competence: rapidly deteriorating, the last speakers being fully bilingual in Russian

A project aiming at creating a literary norm for Orok (in Cyrillic script) and teaching the language at elementary schools has recently been launched in cooperation with Japanese scholars; earlier, the Japanese syllabic script (katakana) has also been used to transcribe Orok material.

This language is not passing down to children.

In the past, dialectal differences existed depending on speakers' geographical location. There used to be high multilingualism among the Uilta.

In general, Ainu used to be a local lingua franca in the mid 19th century, but it is unclear whether the southern Uilta were capable of speaking Ainu. The nothern Uilta might be able to speak Nivkh before the 20th century. The Uilta were also in a long term contact with the Evenki in terms of economy and culture.

During the WWII, the northern Uilta had to learn Russian in school whereas the southern group were influenced by Japanese. After the WWII, the island has been governed by the URSS, leading to language shift to Russian among the indigenous groups ("Russification"). A small portion of the southern Uilta had moved to Hokkaido (Japan) but they failed to pass down Uilta to the following generations.

"Measures have since been put in place to revive Uilta and use it in education. In the 1990s a writing system for the Uilta language was devised,which paved the way for the first primer (Ikegami et al.2008). This book is now being used to teach Uilta in Poronaisk in the south,and classes are due to begin in Val in the north(according to the data acquired in September 2009)." (p. 70)

Less than 10% of the population speak Orok. The rest have shifted to Russian.