Modern ethnicities Diaspora Performing arts Government agencies Television Radio Newspapers The Demographics of Kenya is monitored by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics.

Some of the prominent Bantu groups in Kenya include the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Luhya, the Kisii, the Meru, and the Mijikenda.

In Kenya's last colonial census of 1962, population groups residing in the territory included European, African and Asian individuals.

The largest native ethnic groups were the Kikuyu (8,148,668), Luhya (6,820,000), Kalenjin (6,358,113), Luo (5,066,966), Kamba (4,663,910), Somalis (2,780,502), Kisii (2,703,235), Mijikenda (2,488,691), Meru (1,975,869), Maasai (1,189,522), and Turkana (1,016,174).

[21] The number of ethnic categories and sub-categories recorded in the census has changed significantly over time, expanding from 42 in 1969 to more than 120 in 2019.

The term Bantu denotes widely dispersed but related peoples that speak south-central Niger–Congo languages.

Originally from Cameroon-Nigeria border regions, Bantus began a millennium-long series of migrations referred to as the Bantu expansion that first brought them south into East Africa about 2,000 years ago.

Some of the prominent Bantu groups in Kenya include the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Luhya, the Kisii, the Meru, and the Mijikenda.

Significant Asian migration to Kenya began between 1896 and 1901 when some 32,000 indentured labourers were recruited from British India to build the Kenya-Uganda Railway.

[36] The community grew significantly during the colonial period, and in the 1962 census Asians made up a third of the population of Nairobi and consisted of 176,613 people across the country.

[36] Since Kenyan independence large numbers have emigrated due to racism-related tensions with the Bantu and Nilotic majority.

Nowadays, only a small minority of them are landowners (livestock and game ranchers, horticulturists and farmers), with the majority working in the tertiary sector: in air transport, finance, import, and hospitality.

Apart from isolated individuals such as anthropologist and conservationist Richard Leakey, F.R.S., who died in 2022, Kenyan-Europeans have completely retreated from Kenyan politics, and are no longer represented in public service and parastatals, from which the last remaining staff from colonial times retired in the 1970s.

Arabs are locally referred to as Washihiri or, less commonly, as simply Shihiri in the Bantu Swahili language, Kenya's lingua franca.

The two official languages, English and Swahili, serve as the main lingua franca between the various ethnic groups.

[41] CIA World Factbook estimate:[5] % Attribution: Media related to Demographics of Kenya at Wikimedia Commons