Kuliak Loanwords in the Luhya, Gusii, Kalenjin and Sukuma languages show that these peoples inhabited western kenya and the southern parts of Lake Victoria before being absorbed by the ancestors of these Bantu and Nilotic speakers.

The Southern Rub lived as far south as Lake Eyasi as shown by Kuliak loanwords in the Hadza and Sandawe languages.

An early suggestion for Ik as a member of Afroasiatic was made by Archibald Tucker in the 1960s; this was criticized as weak and abandoned by the 1980s.

For other vowel correspondences, Heine reconstructs clusters of vowels: Heine reconstructs two classes of stress in Proto-Kuliak: "primary", which could occur in any position and remains in place in all Kuliak languages, and "secondary", which always occurred on the 2nd syllable of a word, and remains there in Ik and Nyang'i, but shifts to the first syllable in Tepes.

Blench[9] notes that Kuliak languages do not have extensive internal diversity and clearly had a relatively recent common ancestor.