The main ethnic group in the district are the Pokot, a group that shares a common culture and customs with the Pokot and Kalenjin of Kenya.
Kalenjin in this broad linguistic sense should not be confused with Kalenjin as a term for the common identity the Nandi-speaking peoples of Kenya assumed halfway the twentieth century; see Kalenjin and Kalenjin language.
The Kipsigis people are the most numerous tribe of the Kalenjin in Kenya Accounting for 60% of all kalenjin speakers.
In Kenya, where speakers make up 18% of the population, the name Kalenjin, a Nandi expression meaning "I say (to you)", gained prominence in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, when several Kalenjin-speaking peoples united under it.
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The Nandi languages, or Kalenjin proper, are a dialect cluster of the Kalenjin branch of the Nilotic language family.
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The ethnic Kenyan Kalenjin are the Nandi proper (Cemual), Terik (Nyang'ori), Kipsigis, Keiyo, South Tugen (Tuken), and Cherangany.
Their territory borders the Republic of Kenya which is a home to more than five million Kalenjin, a large ethnic group to which the Sebei belongs.
As with some Bantu groups, the Kalenjin and other Nilotes in the Great Lakes region have through interaction adopted many customs and practices from neighbouring Southern Cushitic groups.
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According to the Kenya's 2009 census, The Kalenjin has a population of 4,967,328 people making it the third largest group in Kenya after the Kikuyu, and the Luhya.
There were particular worries in the Rift Valley Province, where tensions between Kalenjin and Kikuyu populations had caused the worst of the 2007 violence.
The area is increasingly visited by tourists and is situated at the southern end of a region of Kenya inhabited largely by pastoralist ethnic groups including Il Chamus, Rendille, Turkana and Kalenjin.
Much of the ethnic conflicts in Kenya tend to usually more often occur only between the nation's larger ethnic groups such as the: Kikuyu, Luhya, Luo and the Kalenjin.
They are generally divided into two groups, Kalenjin and Omotik–Datooga, although there is some uncertainty as to the internal coherence of the Kalenjin branch.
As a part of the Kalenjin dialect cluster, it is most closely related to such varieties as Kipsigis and Nandi.
The original indigenous occupants of the land were predominantly from the Kalenjin, Maasai and Kikuyu tribes.