The Mandalorian language has more terms of insult than any of the more widely spoken galactic tongues. But whereas most species choose insults that are based on parentage or appearance, the majority of Mandalorian pejoratives are concerned with cowardice, stupidity, laziness, dull conversation, or a lack of hygiene. It reveals the preoccupations of a nomadic warrior culture where bloodline matters less than personal qualities, faces are largely masked, and a clean, efficient camp is crucial to survival.

The origins of Mando'a were believed to have lain with the language of the Taung, an ancient race of Humanoid simians that originated on Coruscant in the time before the Galactic Republic's formation. The Taung were driven from Coruscant by the Human Battalions of Zhell after a lengthy war, and under the leadership of Mandalore the First, conquered a new planet they named Mandalore in their leader's honour, becoming the first Mandalorians-or Mando'ade, "Children of Mandalore" in Mando'a. Despite this direct lineage, and the fact that the Taung spoke an archaic dialect that evolved into the later Mando'a, contemporary Mando'a contained unique elements unlike any found in other galactic languages. Mando'a had no grammatical cases, only two forms for a verb to take, a tense prefix system, and simplistic rules for forming adjectives from nouns and verb stems. Spelling and punctuation forms were optional, decided upon by the preference of the individual speaker-"jagyc" and "jagla", for instance, were both correct ways of saying "masculine."

To understand and be able to speak Mando'a was one of the Resol'nare, the six central tenets that an individual had to observe in their daily life should they wish to be a Mandalorian. This respect for the language, along with Mando'a's natural flexibility, meant that words drawn from other languages were a rarity, and Mando'a changed very little throughout the centuries despite the many languages the Mandalorians learned to speak and the vast influence from alien cultures. If a new word for a thing or concept were needed, Mandalorians would typically draw upon the existing Mando'a vocabulary to form an appropriate term. Mando'a was an agglutinative language, meaning that many words were formed by combining two or more others, without changing their form, to create a new word with a new meaning. An example of this was the term dar'jetii, which is a combination of the Mando'a words dar, meaning "no longer", and jetii, the Mandalorian word for Jedi. Literally translated, dar'jetii meant "no longer a Jedi", but was mostly used contextually to indicate "Sith." However, hut'tuun-the Mandalorian word for "coward"-found its roots in the common Mandalorian dislike for Hutts, precisely their tendency to hire others to handle their martial needs in their stead.

Concordian, the language spoken on both the planet Concord Dawn and Mandalore's moon, Concordia, was a dialect of Mando'a. As such, though they differed in certain aspects, the two languages were mutually intelligible, meaning that they were similar enough that an individual speaking one could easily converse with someone speaking the other. The dialect spoken by the Human child Sasha ot Sulem in 3956 BBY, following the girl's kidnapping and her time living among the Mandalorians on Dantooine, was believed by the Jedi Knight Revan to be a jumbled off-shoot of Mando'a.

Mando'a was a primarily spoken language, rather than a written one, and was thus an expressive language that was often thought of as easy to learn, a trait highly desirable in a culture that regularly adopted adults from numerous races and species. The language's grammar was relatively uncomplicated, but there were elements that necessitated adjustments for a speaker of Basic, including Mando'a's expression of tense, and its gender-neutrality. Because Mandalorians believed in living their history, along with the idea that a tomorrow was not always a certainty, past and future tense were colloquially done away with. Instead, the prefixes ru for "past", and ven for "future", were used in place of the more widely-used tense forms. There was also no passive verb form in Mando'a; a verb was either active or simply absent from the statement.

Furthermore, infinitive verbs ended in -ir, -ar, -ur, -or, or -er. To produce the stem, removing the "r" at the end was all that was required. Ni vorer was incorrect, but Ni vore-meaning "I accept" and using the inflected form-was correct. Oftentimes, an apostrophe-known in Mando'a as a beten, or "sigh"-was used to separate the terminal vowel, indicating the slight glottal pause of some Mandalorian accents. Other uses for the beten were as an indication of a breath, for pronunciation, or a sign of a dropped letter or letters in a contraction. For instance, the sentence "I carry a saber" could be translated in Mando'a as the formal ni juri kad, or the pronunciation-marked ni jur'i kad, since the emphasis was placed on the second syllable in the word juri, and even the more commonly contracted ni jur'kad. Dropping a terminal vowel when conjugating was quite common, especially in Mandalorian poetry and song. Occasionally, certain verbs would be left out all together, and instead implied via word order. While this tendency to forgo certain words could be confusing to Basic speakers, and make the language appear abrupt, the militaristic Mandalorians had largely assumed the concise speech common in military orders. Whereas the literal translation for "It's good" would be bic cuyi jate, a Mandalorian was much more likely to just say jate, or "good", instead.

Due to Mando'a's nature as a gender-neutral language, gender was implied by context. Buir meant both "mother" and "father", just as "son" and "daughter" were both represented by the word ad. When it was necessary to specify gender, the adjectives of jagyc or dalyc-male and female, respectively-would be added. This grammatical system was a rarity for a language spoken by beings who reproduced sexually.

To form a question, the interrogative prefix tion was placed at the beginning of a sentence. While Gar verborad'ni meant "You are hiring me", the addition of the tion prefix placed before gar would turn the previous statement into the question, "Are you hiring me?" Another example of a meaningful prefix was ke, which was drawn from the Mando'a word for "order", or ke'gyce, and was placed at the start of a sentence to indicate a command. In order to create the negative form in Mando'a, the prefix n', nu, nu', or ne was added before either the sentence or the individual word. Ne'briikase meant "unhappy", while Nu'ni juri kad meant "I don't carry a saber". When forming a plural, -e was added to the end of words ending in consonants, while -se was added to the end of words ending in a vowel. As with most languages, there were exceptions to the rule, such as in the case of gett becoming gett'se. Originally, the indication of a plural was done with an -a suffix rather than an -e, a practice that went away over time.

Adjectives and adverbs were formed by adding the suffixes -la or -yc to the end of pre-existing nouns. Di'kut, meaning "idiot" in Mando'a, could easily become di'kutla, meaning "idiotic". Comparatives and superlatives were formed in much the same way. When creating a comparative, the suffix -shy'a was added to the end of the standard adjective. For a superlative, the -ne suffix was added. An example would be the word dral, meaning "bright", becoming dralshy'a, or "brighter", and the word jate, meaning "good", becoming jatne, or "best". No distinction between adverbs and adjectives was made in Mando'a, and although a non-Mando'a speaker might make out a Mandalorian to be uneducated should he say in Basic, "The boys done good", it was much more likely that they were simply unfamiliar with Basic's past tense and adverbial forms. Mando'a also made less use of articles such as "the" and "an" than Basic, generally adding them only for emphasis.

Mando'a had a similar pronunciation to Basic, with a few notable exceptions. The letters "f", "x", or "z" were not present in Mando'a, although the written form of the Mandalorian alphabet included the letters for greater ease in transliterating foreign words. In the absence of the letter "f", Mando'a substituted the similar-sounding "vh" combination, and the Mandalorian "s" could be pronounced in the same way as a common "z". Occasionally, the pronunciation of "d" was swapped with the more modern "t". Though certain Mandalorian communities still preferred to pronounce the letter "j" as a "y" sound, instead of the more commonly heard hard "j" found in words like "joy". When speaking, the first "h" present in a word was typically aspirated-aside from its archaic form used in traditional songs and poems-and always pronounced when found in the middle of a word. Mando'a possessed no silent letters, though the opposite was often true of Mandalorian songs: terminal consonants could become extra syllables in order to better maintain rhythm and meter. For example, tor could easily become to-rah, and tang could just as easily become tan-gah.