"The preservation of the Northern dialect is much better [than the Southern dialect] but still far from rejoicing. Since the 1970s the Northern dialect began to lose its positions: in larger settlements with the bulk of the population formed by newcomers from different parts of Russia and Selkups being a minority it is rarely spoken even in purely Selkup families (and one third of all Selkup families in the district are mixed being Selkup-Russian, Selkup-Ukrain, etc.) and its natural transmission from parents to children practically stopped. In small villages where Selkups constitute the majority of the population (Ratta, Pur Tolka) natural transmission of the language from parents to children is still preserved. To-day the functioning of Selkup is strongly connected with traditional activities of the population, especially reindeer herding."

"In the Tomsk region, the Yamalo-Nenets autonomous area and the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk territory Selkup has a status of a protected language... All Selkups speaking Selkup are bilingual with Russian as their second or sometimes their first language. There are no Selkup speaking monolinguals any more."

"It should be mentioned that the main sphere of the functioning of the Selkup writing system is education. Outside school and university the Selkup writing (both in the Northern dialect and in the dialects of the Southern Selkups) is very little used."

The only member of the Selkup group of idioms that, for the moment, is not yet threatened by imminent extinction.

Degree of speakers' competence: under interference from Russian.

A written standard (in Cyrillic script) has recently been (re)introduced and is being used, with modest success, in elementary-level school instruction