 The first formal description of the tractrac chat was by the English publisher John Wilkes in 1817 under the binomial name "Motacilla tractrac".The species was subsequently placed in the genus "Cercomela" introduced by Charles Lucien Bonaparte in 1856.It was moved to its current genus, "Emarginata", after molecular phylogenetic studies published in 2010 and 2012 found that "Cercomela" was polyphyletic.