The Tuareg are the southernmost Berber-speaking population, inhabiting a Saharan and Sahelian arc that runs from southern Algeria and southwestern Libya through northern Niger, northern Mali, and into Burkina Faso. They call themselves Imuhagh in the north and Imushagh or Kel Tamasheq further south.
Tamasheq, in its northern (Tamahaq) and southern (Tamasheq, Tamajaq) variants, is the Tuareg language, with around three million speakers. It is the only Berber language to have continuously preserved an indigenous script — Tifinagh — derived from the ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet and still in active vernacular use, particularly among women.
Tuareg society is organised in confederations (Kel) — Kel Ahaggar, Kel Ajjer, Kel Aïr, Kel Adagh, Iwellemmedan, and others — historically structured by a hierarchy of noble (Imajeghan), vassal (Imghad), religious (Ineslemen), and dependent strata. The veil (tagelmust) is worn by men, who cover the lower face from adolescence onwards.
The trans-Saharan caravan economy that long defined the Tuareg sphere — exchanging salt, dates, gold, and slaves between the Maghreb and the Sahel — declined in the twentieth century under colonial border-drawing, post-independence state-building, and the closure of the Sahara to free movement. Cycles of Tuareg rebellion in Niger and Mali from the 1960s onwards, intensifying in the 1990s and again from 2007 and 2012, are the principal modern political fact.