Timalien
The brown babbler was described in 1828 by Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar from a specimen collected in the Kordofan Province of Sudan. He originally placed it in the bulbul genus "Ixos". The species is closely related to and forms a superspecies with the white-headed babbler of eastern Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and the arrow-marked babbler of central and southern Africa. The Old World babbler family Timaliidae has been the subject of much research and has been split by some taxonomic authorities. This move that would place this species with the laughingthrushes in the family Leiothrichidae.