[1] Kakuk studied at the University of Debrecen from 1944 to 1949 and graduated with degrees in Hungarian and Latin.
She went on to pursue a PhD in 1951 at Faculty of Humanities of the Eötvös Loránd University where she studied under Gyula Németh.
[2] During this period she was also engaged in work at the Institute of Linguistics at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Later work involved visiting Turkish-speaking communities throughout the Balkans to examine their dialects.
[1] In 1984 Kakuk founded the Hungarian orientalist journal Keletkutatás ISSN 0133-4778; she served as its editor-in-chief until 1994.