They are spoken by the Tuareg Berbers in large parts of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Libya, and Burkina Faso, with a few speakers, the Kinnin, in Chad.

[2] Tuareg dialects belong to the South Berber group and are sometimes regarded as a single language (as for instance by Karl-Gottfried Prasse).

[citation needed] The Tuareg languages are traditionally written in the indigenous Tifinagh alphabet.

Among these are the 1,500 year old monumental tomb of the Tuareg matriarch Tin Hinan, where vestiges of a Tifinagh inscription have been found on one of its walls.

[19] The consonant inventory largely resembles Arabic: differentiated voicing; uvulars, pharyngeals (traditionally referred to as emphatics) /tˤ/, /lˤ/, /sˤ/, /dˤ/, /zˤ/; requiring the pharynx muscles to contract and influencing the pronunciation of the following vowel, and no voiceless bilabial plosive.

It is realized as h in Tamahaq (Tahaggart), as š in Tamasheq and as simple z in the Tamajaq dialects Tawallammat and Tayart.

No simple adjectives exist in the Tuareg languages; adjectival concepts are expressed using a relative verb form traditionally called 'participle'.

Tamasheq prefers VSO order; however it contains topic–comment structure (like in American Sign Language, Modern Hebrew, Japanese and Russian), allowing the emphasized concept to be placed first, be it the subject or object, the latter giving an effect somewhat like the English passive.

[30] Sudlow uses the following examples, all expressing the concept "Men don't cook porridge" (e denotes Sudlow's schwa): Again like Japanese, the "pronoun/particle 'a' is used with a following relative clause to bring a noun in a phrase to the beginning for emphasis," a structure which can be used to emphasize even objects of prepositions.

[31] Sudlow's example (s denotes voiceless palato-alveolar fricative): The indirect object marker takes the form i/y in Tudalt and e/y in Tadɣaq.

[32] As a root-and-pattern, or templatic language, triliteral roots (three-consonant bases) are the most common in Tamasheq.