section_path: History
section_name: History
paragraph_text: History
  
  Early forms of present-day Hindustani developed from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhraṃśa vernaculars of present-day North India in the 7th–13th centuries. Hindustani emerged as a contact language around Delhi, a result of the increasing linguistic diversity that occurred due to Muslim rule. Amir Khusrow, who lived in the thirteenth century during the Delhi Sultanate period in North India, used these forms (which was the lingua franca of the period) in his writings and referred to it as Hindavi (Persian: ھندوی, lit. ' of Hind or India '). By the end of the century, the military exploits of Alauddin Khalji, introduced the language in the Deccan region, which led to the development of its southern dialect Deccani, which was promoted by Muslim rulers in the Deccan.
  
  The Delhi Sultanate, which comprised several Turkic and Afghan dynasties that ruled much of the subcontinent from Delhi, was succeeded by the Mughal Empire in 1526 and preceded by the Ghorid dynasty and Ghaznavid Empire before that.
  
  Ancestors of the language were known as Hindui, Hindavi, Zabān-e Hind (transl. 'Language of India'), Zabān-e Hindustan (transl. 'Language of Hindustan'), Hindustan ki boli (transl. 'Language of Hindustan'), Rekhta, and Hindi. Its regional dialects became known as Zabān-e Dakhani in southern India, Zabān-e Gujari (transl. 'Language of Gujars') in Gujarat, and as Zabān-e Dehlavi or Urdu around Delhi. It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving its base primarily from the Western Hindi dialect of Delhi, also known as Khariboli.
  
  Although the Mughals were of Timurid (Gurkānī) Turco-Mongol descent, they were Persianised, and Persian had gradually become the state language of the Mughal empire after Babur, a continuation since the introduction of Persian by Central Asian Turkic rulers in the Indian Subcontinent, and the patronisation of it by the earlier Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianised Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties.
  
  Hindustani began to take shape as a Persianised vernacular during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 AD) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in South Asia. Hindustani retained the grammar and core vocabulary of the local Delhi dialect. However, as an emerging common dialect, Hindustani absorbed large numbers of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic loanwords, and as Mughal conquests grew it spread as a lingua franca across much of northern India; this was a result of the contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures in Hindustan that created a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. The language was also known as Rekhta, or 'mixed', which implies that it was mixed with Persian. Written in the Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, and occasionally Kaithi or Gurmukhi scripts, it remained the primary lingua franca of northern India for the next four centuries, although it varied significantly in vocabulary depending on the local language. Alongside Persian, it achieved the status of a literary language in Muslim courts and was also used for literary purposes in various other settings such as Sufi, Nirgun Sant, Krishna Bhakta circles, and Rajput Hindu courts. Its majors centres of development included the Mughal courts of Delhi, Lucknow, Agra and Lahore as well as the Rajput courts of Amber and Jaipur.
  
  In the 18th century, towards the end of the Mughal period, with the fragmentation of the empire and the elite system, a variant of Hindustani, one of the successors of apabhraṃśa vernaculars at Delhi, and nearby cities, came to gradually replace Persian as the lingua franca among the educated elite upper class particularly in northern India, though Persian still retained much of its pre-eminence for a short period. The term Hindustani was given to that language. The Perso-Arabic script form of this language underwent a standardisation process and further Persianisation during this period (18th century) and came to be known as Urdu, a name derived from Persian: Zabān-e Urdū-e Mualla ('language of the court') or Zabān-e Urdū (زبان اردو, 'language of the camp'). The etymology of the word Urdu is of Chagatai origin, Ordū ('camp'), cognate with English horde, and known in local translation as Lashkari Zabān (لشکری زبان), which is shortened to Lashkari (لشکری). This is all due to its origin as the common speech of the Mughal army. As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings. Along with English, it became the first official language of British India in 1850.
  
  Hindi as a standardised literary register of the Hindustani arose in the 19th century. While the first literary works (mostly translations of earlier works) in Sanskritised Hindustani were already written in the early 19th century as part of a literary project that included both Hindu and Muslim writers (e.g. Lallu Lal, Insha Allah Khan), the call for a distinct Sanskritised standard of Hindustani written in Devanagari under the name of Hindi became increasingly politicised in the course of the century and gained pace around 1880 in an effort to displace Urdu's official position.
  
  John Fletcher Hurst in his book published in 1891 mentioned that the Hindustani or camp language of the Mughal Empire 's courts at Delhi was not regarded by philologists as a distinct language but only as a dialect of Hindi with admixture of Persian. He continued: "But it has all the magnitude and importance of separate language. It is linguistic result of Muslim rule of eleventh & twelfth centuries and is spoken (except in rural Bengal) by many Hindus in North India and by Musalman population in all parts of India." Next to English it was the official language of British Raj, was commonly written in Arabic or Persian characters, and was spoken by approximately 100,000,000 people. The process of hybridization also led to the formation of words in which the first element of the compound was from Khari Boli and the second from Persian, such as rajmahal 'palace' (raja 'royal, king' + mahal 'house, place') and rangmahal 'fashion house' (rang 'colour, dye' + mahal 'house, place'). As Muslim rule expanded, Hindustani speakers traveled to distant parts of India as administrators, soldiers, merchants, and artisans. As it reached new areas, Hindustani further hybridized with local languages. In the Deccan, for instance, Hindustani blended with Telugu and came to be called Dakhani. In Dakhani, aspirated consonants were replaced with their unaspirated counterparts; for instance, dekh 'see' became dek, ghula 'dissolved' became gula, kuch 'some' became kuc, and samajh 'understand' became samaj.
  
  When the British colonised the Indian subcontinent from the late 18th through to the late 19th century, they used the words 'Hindustani', 'Hindi', and 'Urdu' interchangeably. They developed it as the language of administration of British India, further preparing it to be the official language of modern India and Pakistan. However, with independence, use of the word 'Hindustani' declined, being largely replaced by 'Hindi' and 'Urdu', or 'Hindi-Urdu' when either of those was too specific. More recently, the word 'Hindustani' has been used for the colloquial language of Bollywood films, which are popular in both India and Pakistan and which cannot be unambiguously identified as either Hindi or Urdu.
  
  British rule over India also introduced some English words into Hindustani, with these influences increasing with the later spread of English as a world language. This has created a new variant of Hindustani known as Hinglish.