Towards a genealogical classification of Taa dialects

This paper briefly summarises the current state of research on the classification of Taa. It suggests a genealogical (historical) classification based on the evidence of grammatical and phonological features in the data from 20 varieties. The split between West !Xoon of Namibia and the remaining varieties is argued to be historically deeper than the division between western dialects and eastern dialects identified by Traill (1974b, 1985). The resulting tree suggests a scenario whereby Taa would have spread from west to east.