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The Kadazan language has adopted several loanwords, particularly from other northern Borneo indigenous languages and also Malay. There are claims that Penampang people speak Kadazan Tangaa' dialect while the Papar people generally speak Kadazan.
The use of the language has been declining due to the use of Malay by the Malaysian federal government and by the use of English by missionaries, which was done through the method of language shift enforced by the work of both the colonial and federal governments. The state of Sabah has introduced policies to prevent this decline, which is also happening to other native Sabahan languages. This included the policy of using Kadazan and other indigenous languages in public schools. Efforts have also been done to allow the language to become official in the state.
In an earlier 2005 Unesco’s report, the Kadazan-Dusun language was classified as an endangered language, spoken by a mere 300,000 people. The language has apparently joined the 7,000+ other languages worldwide that face the threat of extinction.[16]On the bright side, Datuk Philip Lasimbang, Chair of Board of Directors Kadazandusun Language Foundation (KLF) had stated that the Kadazandusun language will never go extinct because it has entered our education system, is formalised and has been institutionalised.[17]
The similarities between the Kadazan and Dusun languages are sufficient for speakers of these two languages to understand each other easily. In a nutshell, the most salient distinction between these two languages are the differences in their phonemic charts.
Kadazan consists of fricatives /v/ and /z/ which are absent in Dusun. On the other hand, /w/, /y/ and /r/ are present in Dusun but not in Kadazan. Kadazan is one of the Austronesianlanguages which extensively employ the voiced alveolar sibilant fricative /z/ in their native lexicons. The other languages for instance, are some of Formosan languages belong to the Taiwanese aborigines.

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