There are mentions of Chudes living in Adzele county from 12th century Russian sources.

According to August Wilhelm Hupel's book Topographische Nachrichten von Lief und Ehstland there were about thousand Estonians in 1777.

According to Harri Moora and Paul Ariste, Gauja Estonians were the original inhabitants of their homelands.

[1] The last known speaker of local dialect, Anton Bok, died on April 20, 1988.

It had some grammatical and phonological loans from the Latvian language and possibly some from Livonian.