Northern Khanty is reportedly still being used in many families as an idiom of internal communication, though Russian is universally learnt as the dominant language; native language skills are, however, often destroyed by the unifying boarding school system, operating in Russian only.

Degree of speakers' competence: generally good, though under increasing interference from Russian; Northern Khanty itself is, however, far from a uniform language, and the dialectal varieties cannot be served by a single normative standard.

separate written norms (in Cyrillic script) exist for some of the dialects, but they have very limited use