The Taita people (Wataita) are a Bantu-speaking ethnic group indigenous to the Taita Hills in Taita-Taveta County in south-eastern Kenya, near the Tanzanian border. The name Kitaita is the Kiswahili cover term for the languages of this community; speakers themselves use the term Kidaw'ida to refer to their principal language, and call themselves Wadawida. The Taita languages belong to the Northeast Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo family and are most closely related to the Chaga languages of Tanzania, reflecting a historical connection to the broader Kilimanjaro Corridor cultural and linguistic zone.

The linguistic landscape of the Taita Hills is not a single unified language but a cluster of closely related varieties associated with the three massifs of the Taita Hills:

• Kidaw'ida (Daw'ida) — the largest and most widely spoken variety, associated with the Dawida massif and the heartland of Taita identity. ISO 639-3: dav. This is the variety targeted by the Mbogho et al. (2025) NLP corpus project and the variety most commonly referred to when "Kitaita" or "Taita language" is used in educational and media contexts.
• Kisaghala (Saghala) — associated with the Saghalla massif. Linguists consider Saghala sufficiently distinct from Daw'ida to be treated as a separate language rather than a dialect. ISO 639-3: tga. It is also more closely related to the Giriama variety of Mijikenda than Daw'ida is, reflecting a different contact history.
• Kikasigau (Kasigau) — associated with the Kasigau massif in the lowlands south of the main Taita Hills. Generally treated as a dialect of Daw'ida rather than a distinct language, though it has local features reflecting contact with Chaga and Pare across the Tanzanian border.

All three varieties contain loanwords from two now-extinct South Cushitic languages collectively known as Taita Cushitic, whose speakers were assimilated into the Taita community within living historical memory, adding a further layer of linguistic complexity to this community's heritage.

This archive collects language materials from across all Taita varieties. Geographic provenance and variety affiliation are recorded at the item level. A unified Latin-script orthography for Taita was established in 2012 as part of the Kenya national Bantu language harmonisation project, and deposits using this orthography are encouraged.