[5] Usher & Schapper (2022) find them to be one of three branches of the West Bomberai family within Trans–New Guinea, with regular sound correspondences.
Kaiping and Klamer (2019), though, found Bunak to be the most divergent Timor-Alor-Pantar language, splitting off before East Timor and Alor-Pantar did.
Based on a careful examination of new lexical data, Holton & Robinson (2014) find little evidence to support a connection between TAP and TNG.
[10] However, Holton & Robinson (2017) concedes that a relationship with Trans-New Guinea and West Bomberai in particular is the most likely hypothesis, though they prefer to leave it unclassified for now.
[16] Proto-Timor–Alor–Pantar pronouns as reconstructed by Ross (2005) are: Usher (2020) reconstructs the free and bound forms of the pronouns as: These have regular paradigms, with suffixes *-i and *-u on the bound forms, so for example 1sg is free *an, direct object and inalienable possessor *na-, locative, ergative and alienable possessor *nai, and dative *nau.
[citation needed] Usher however establishes that proto–West Bomberai initial *k was lost from proto–Timor–Alor–Pantar (for example, proto-WB *kina 'eye', *kira 'water' and *kena[t] 'see' correspond to proto-TAP *ina, *ira and *ena), and that the proto–West Bomberai pronouns 2sg *ka and 2pl *ki, inherited from proto–Trans–New Guinea, correspond regularly to proto–Timor–Alor–Pantar *a and *i, while the proto–Timor–Alor–Pantar third-person pronouns *ga and *gi do not correspond to the rest of West Bomberai (or Trans–New Guinea) and are only coincidentally similar to the reconstructed proto-TNG second-person pronouns.
[1] Schapper et al. (2017: 141-143) reconstruct the following proto-Timor-Alor-Pantar, proto-Alor-Pantar, and proto-Timor forms, demonstrating the relatedness of the Timor and Alor-Pantar languages.