Pokomo people

The Pokomo people are a Bantu ethnic group of southeastern Kenya. Their population in Kenya was 112,075 in 2019. They are a distinct ethnic group with their own sub-clans/tribes. Despite their proximity, they are not of the nearby Mijikenda people. They are predominantly agriculturalists and both freshwater and ocean fishermen living along the Tana River in Tana River County. They speak the Pokomo language, which is similar to Swahili. The Pokomo population is split into two groups: the Upper Pokomo, who make up 75% of the population, and the Lower Pokomo. The Upper Pokomo are mainly Muslim, and have been so since the first half of the 20th century. The Lower Pokomos, who live along the lower part of the Tana up to the delta, became Christians beginning in the late 1870s, and, by 1914, had almost exclusively converted. Ethnologue indicates that the group is mainly Muslim. In "History of Linguistics: Case Study of Tana River", Dereke Nurse confirmed that the Pokomo regard themselves and their language as divisible into Lower (LP) and Upper Pokomo (UP). The people and the language of roughly the northern one-third of the River Tana towards Garisa are known as Malakote (also known as Ilwana or El-Wana). Malakote differ considerably from UP and LP. Even the two-way split UP: LP is partly artificial linguistically. The major break does occur around Mwina, but these are also internal isoglosses dividing UP and LP. Some of these link adjoining part of UP and LP. Within Pokomo, considerable linguistic variation occurs at all levels: lexical, phonological and morphological. Despite the small size of the Pokomo Community, at least as much internal difference separates UP and LP as do the two poles of the 150 mile-long Malakote Community. Van Otterloo assess the level of lexical similarity between UP and LP as much the same as that between Giriama and Digo. UP and LP refer to each other jocularly as "two-week" languages; that is, they take two weeks to learn, but Malakote, within UP is regarded as a "two-months language".