The Bakairi language belongs to the Karib family. According to scholars, it has some elements in common with the languages of the Arára and Txikão and other elements in common with Nahukwá and Kuikúru. All Bakairi speak their language, as well as Portuguese.

Since the 1960s, missionaries of the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.) have been translating Biblical texts to the Bakairi language. They have also elaborated readers to teach reading and writing in the maternal language. These works have tended to uniformize the internal differences, which are worth a careful study.