The Nganasan language (formerly called тавгийский, tavgiysky, or тавгийско-самоедский, tavgiysko-samoyedsky in Russian; from the ethnonym тавги, tavgi) is a moribund Samoyedic language spoken by about 30 of the Nganasan people.

A part of the vocabulary can be traced to elements of unknown substrate origin, which are roughly twice as common in Nganasan than in other Samoyedic languages such as Nenets or Enets, and bear no apparent resemblance to the neighboring Tungusic and Yukaghir languages.

[9][8] Vowels can be divided two pairs of groups based on harmony: front /ⁱa e i y/ vs back /a o ɨ u/, and unrounded /ⁱa e i ɨ/ vs rounded /a o y u/.

[7] The language's Cyrillic-based alphabet was devised in the 1990s: Nouns in Nganasan have the grammatical categories of number (singular, dual, plural), case (nominative, genitive, accusative, lative, locative, elative, prolative, comitative) and possessivity (non-possessive versus possessive forms).

Nganasan has a broad mood paradigm with nine forms: indicative, imperative, interrogative, inferential, renarrative, irrealis, optative, admissive-cohortive, debitive, abessive and prohibitive.

The aspectual opposition between imperfective and perfective verbs remains semantic in most verbal forms.

The dominating word order in Nganasan is SOV, similar to other Samoyedic languages.

However, Nganasan is considered to exhibit more freedom in word order than other languages of its group.

According to Tereščenko (1979), other types of word orders are used for shifting the sentence focus, especially in emphatic speech.

Wagner-Nagy (2010) suggests that Nganasan is similar to Hungarian in its behavior, in that its word order is determined by pragmatic factors rather than being fixed.

There are no prepositions in Nganasan, postpositions are composite parts of words and also require the attributes in genitive cases.

D'aŋku can only be used in present indicative as it behaves like a noun: it takes nominal predicative endings.

The category of conjunctions may be undergoing formation under the influence of Russian (Tereščenko, 1973).

Russian was taught as the primary language in these schools, not only because the administration desired to Russify the population, but also due to the fact Nganasan was spoken rather than written until the 1980s.

The Ust'ye Avam pupils no longer have this education, as their school closed after it burned down in 2012.

Radio Taimyr, with its station in Dudinka have their broadcasts in Nganasan language daily since 1990, but these programs are only of 10–15 minutes long.