According to the classical authors, the Udi inhabited the area of the eastern Caucasus along the coast of the Caspian Sea, in a territory extending to the Kura River in the north.

There was also a province of the Kingdom of Armenia, Utikʻ (later annexed by Caucasian Albania), which likely bore the name of the ancestors of the Udis.

Under Arab and later Persian rule, some of them converted to Islam, and soon adopted the Azeri language.

The Armenian Apostolic Church held services exclusively in the Armenian language and refused to ordain a local Udi priest, against which Udis protested:[10]...our strong desire is that our pastor be a representative of our people, for although we belong to the Church of St. Gregory the Enlightener, our language is different: we are the Uti and we know that these people live nowhere except for the villages of Nizh and Vardashen.

In the recent past, Udi people also lived in Mirzabeily, Soltan Nuha, Jourlu, Mihlikuvah, Vardanli (now Karimli), Bajan, Kirzan, and Yenikend.

[14] Some 50 Udi people remained among some 7000 ethnic Azeris in the town, which was renamed to Oghuz.

Small groups reside in Russia in the Rostov region (Shahty, Taganrog, Rostov-na-Donu, Azov, Aleksandrovka); in the Krasnodar territory (Krasnodar, areas of Dinskoy, Leningrad, Kushchevsky); in the Stavropol Territory (Minvody, Pyatigorsk); in the Volgograd region (Volgograd, Dubovy Ovrag); and also in Sverdlovsk, Ivanovo, Kaluga areas, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Astrakhan; in Georgia in the outskirts of Tbilisi, Poti, Rustavi, in Armenia mainly in the Lori Province, and Aktau in Kazakhstan.

The Udi are commonly bilingual, and less frequently trilingual, depending on residence and work.

Linguists believe the dialects originated according to geographic groupings of the Udi from the Tauz region: the villages of Kirzan and Artzah (Karabah, v. Seysylla, Gasankala) moved to Nidzh and Oguz.

[citation needed] In 1880, the population of the Udi people living in the area around Qabala in northern Azerbaijan[19] was estimated at 10,000.