Kaska is an endangered Athabaskan language. Traditionally, Kaska was an oral aboriginal language used by the Kaska Dena people. The Kaska Dene region consists of a small area in the Southwestern part of the Northwest Territories, the Southeastern part of Yukon Territory, and the Northern part of British Columbia. The communities that are in the Kaska Dene region are Ross River and Watson Lake in Y.T.; Dease Lake, Good Hope Lake, Lower Post, Fireside, and Muncho Lake in B.C. Kaska is made up of eight dialects, all of which have similar pronunciations and expressional terms. The town of Watson Lake was established around the period of the second World War when the Alaska Highway was built in 1942. A major consequence of colonization was Kaska language loss. Another major cause of Kaska language loss in Canada was due to the Canadian Residential School System. The effect that these schools had on the Kaska language have caused a language gap between two generations, resulting in few young speakers.

With around 200 speakers as of 2011, the Ethnologue lists Kaska as Status 7 (shifting). It is mostly Kaska Dena Elders who are the fluent speakers despite four communities (Good Hope Lake, Lower Post, Watson Lake and Ross River) where the language is taught in schools. Kaska Dena children are not learning to be fluent because many families do not use the Kaska language at home. The Kaska Dena people recognize the importance in revitalizing the Kaska language and have worked towards building Kaska language written and oral materials as well as programs such as culture camps and training programs.

Kaska makes use of the vowels /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, which, through various combinations of inflection (high, falling, and rising tone), lengthening and nasalization, produce about 60 vowel sounds in total.

Allophones of sounds /i, e, o, ɛ̃/ can also be heard as [ɪ, ɛ~ə, ʊ, æ̃ː].

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Kaska is a polysynthetic language, commonly featuring sentence words. It is head-final, availing nine prefix positions to a given stem verb morpheme. Kaska does not mark for control or grammatical gender. (Sexual gender is often implied in narratives through contextual association with the prevalent gender roles of Kaska society, particularly with regard to warfare.)

Verb-sentences, or single-word sentences consisting of a stem verb modified by inflectional, derivational and/or other types of affixes, commonly appear in Kaska. In these cases, a word-final verb morpheme may be accompanied by up to nine prefixes grouped into three categories: the disjunct, the conjunct and the verb theme. O'Donnell's Kaska verb structure diagram is shown below.

The verb theme carries the stem verb morpheme, which is immediately preceded by one of four classifiers (-h-, -Ø-, -l-, -d-).