An offshoot of the Phoenician language of coastal West Asia (modern Lebanon and north western Syria), it was principally spoken on the Mediterranean coast of Northwest Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and several Mediterranean islands, such as Malta, Sicily, and Sardinia by the Punic people, or western Phoenicians, throughout classical antiquity, from the 8th century BC to the 6th century AD.

[7] The Punics stayed in contact with the homeland of Phoenicia until the destruction of Carthage by the Roman Republic in 146 BC.

[9] From the fifth-century BC, a shared set of alphabetic, orthographic, and phonological rules are encountered in Punic inscriptions throughout the western Mediterranean, probably due to Carthaginian influence.

The Roman Senate appreciated the works so much that after taking Carthage, they presented them to Berber princes who owned libraries there.

[13] That account agrees with other evidence found to suggest a North African Berber influence on Punic, such as Libyco-Berber names in the Onomasticon of Eusebius.

[14] Besides Augustine, the only proof of Punic-speaking communities at such a late period is a series of trilingual funerary texts found in the Christian catacombs of Sirte, Libya: the gravestones are carved in Ancient Greek, Latin and Punic.

[17] Modern linguistics has proved that Maltese is in fact derived from Arabic, probably Siculo-Arabic specifically, with a large number of loanwords from Italian.

Today there are a number of common Berber roots that descend from Punic, including the word for "learn" (*almid, *yulmad; compare Hebrew למד).

The play Poenulus by Plautus contains a few lines of vernacular Punic which have been subject to some research because unlike inscriptions, they largely preserve the vowels.

In many cases a stressed long ā developed into /o/, for example in the third person masculine singular of the suffixing conjugation of the verb, baròk, 'he has blessed' (compare Hebrew baràk).

In late Punic and Neo-Punic the glottal stop and pharyngeal and laryngeal consonants were no longer pronounced.

[26] In this section "Grammar"[27] the notation "XX (xxxx)" is used, where XX is the spelling in Punic characters (without vowels), while xxxx is a phonetic rendering, including vowels, as can be reconstructed from Punic language texts written in the Latin or Greek alphabets.

Whenever such a pronoun might be needed, it was circumscribed by means of words like ’ḤD (’ḥḥad), 'one', ’Š (’īs) or ’DM (’adom), 'a man, a person', or KL (kil), 'all'.

The other common stems are:[37] A few other stems are found only very rarely: The paradigm of the Qal is (the verb B-R-K (barok), 'to bless', is used as an example): The following Niph‘al forms are attested in Punic and Neo-Punic (verb: P-‘-L, fel, 'to make'; < Phoenician pa‘ol): The following Pi‘el forms are attested in Punic and Neo-Punic (verb: Ḥ-D-Š, ḥados, 'to make new, to restore'): The following Yiph‘il forms are attested in Punic and Neo-Punic (verb: Q-D-Š, qados, 'to dedicate'): Many (Neo-)Punic verbs are "weak": depending on the specific root consonants certain deviations of the standard verbal paradigm occur.

For example, the suffix form (perfect) is often translated by a present tense, but it may also refer to the past or future.

[38] The tense, aspect and mood of a given verbal form may depend on: The numbers from one to ten are: Punic and Neo-Punic take part in the so-called "Semitic polarity": the numbers 3-10 take the feminine form with masculine nouns, and vice versa.

[41] The repertoire of possible ways in (Neo-)Punic to express a certain combination of tense, aspect, and mood seems to be more restricted than in Phoenician, but at the same time the rules seem to have become less strict.

Act V of Plautus's comedy Poenulus opens with Hanno speaking in Punic, his native language, in the first ten lines.

Moreover, in this way he could enter puns by introducing in his play would-be translators who, to comical effect, claimed to, but did not in fact, understand Punic, and thus gave nonsensical 'translations'.

hunesobinesubicsillimbalim esseantidamossonalemuedubertefet donobun.hun ec cil thumucommucroluful 945 altanimauosduberithemhuarcharistolem sitt esed anec naso ters ahelicot alemu [y]s duber timur mucop[m] suistiti aoccaaneclictorbod es iussilim limmim colus Plautus (or a later redactor[45]) next provided a Latin translation of the preceding lines:[46] deos deasque veneror, qui hanc urbem colunt, 950 ut quod de mea re huc veni rite venerim, measque hic ut gnatas et mei fratris filium reperire me siritis, di vostram fidem.

eius filium esse hic praedicant Agorastoclem: ad eum hospitalem hanc tesseram mecum fero; is in hisce habitare monstratust regionibus.

[47] I worship the gods and goddesses who preside over this city, that I may have come hither with good omen as to this business of mine, on which I have come; and, to find my daughters and the son of my cousin, lend me your aid, ye gods, that you may permit me those who were stolen away from me, and his son from my cousin.

Recently efforts have been made to, among other things, fill in the redactions in the "unknown language" part and to properly split the morphemes.