It was spoken in the villages around Kilit, located 12 kilometers southwest from the city of Ordubad in a district with the same name of Nakhchivan in Azerbaijan.

[1][3] The language has been long known to the Russian historians and travelers since the middle of nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.

Chopin remarks that the inhabitants of Kilit village were professing Shiite faith and their language is not similar to any of the other local dialects.

But only Zelinsky's materials are enough to understand that kiliti is not an argot, possesses an independent grammatical structure and have the main base of the root words and all the typical features of the Iranian languages.

The existing materials also provide a sufficient basis to determine it as belonging to the northwestern Iranian group of languages.