The name approximates to "the old men sat down", dating from a time of migration 300 or more years ago when this group refused to travel further on (to what is now Teso).
They are a cattle-keeping people practising transhumance, which is reflected in the language as are their traditional religious beliefs.
Closely related languages and dialects are spoken by many more peoples, including the Jie, Dodoth, Teso (in Uganda), Turkana, Tesyo (in Kenya), Jiye, Toposa in South Sudan (?
[2][page needed] Jie and Dodoth (Dodos) are counted as dialects by Ethnologue 16, but as separate languages by Blench (2012).
There are generally suffixes on plural nouns which, to the learner at least, have little regularity, for example 'emong / ŋimongin' – 'ox / oxen' and 'akai / ŋakais' - 'house/s', or even removal of last letter, thus 'emoru / ŋimor' – 'mountain/s' and 'aberu / ŋaber(u)' – 'woman / women'.
Written Ngakarimojong uses the Roman alphabet, and spelling rules were established by missionaries in the 1960s.
The Ngakarimojong alphabet includes the letters eng ("Ŋ") and nya ("Ny").
The general tendency is to assume that the "Y" sound comes from the conjunction of the vowels rather than being a separate letter, but not exclusively.
More recently, there have been some educational books and there are various grammars and dictionaries produced mainly by Roman Catholic religious.