section_path: Culture/Language
section_name: Language
paragraph_text: Language
  
  According to Qazvini, by the time of Shah Jahan, the emperor was only familiar with a few Turki words and showed little interest in the study of the language as a child. Though the Mughals were of Turko-Mongol origin, their reign enacted the revival and height of the Persian language in the Indian subcontinent, and by the end of the 16th-century Turki (Chagatai) was understood by relatively few at court. Accompanied by literary patronage was the institutionalisation of Persian as an official and courtly language; this led to Persian reaching nearly the status of a first language for many inhabitants of Mughal India. Muzaffar Alam argues that the Mughals used Persian purposefully as the vehicle of an overarching Indo-Persian political culture, to unite their diverse empire. Persian had a profound impact on the languages of South Asia; one such language, today known as Hindustani, developed in the imperial capital of Delhi in the late Mughal era. It began to be used as a literary language in the Mughal court from the reign of Shah Jahan, who described it as the language of his dastans (prose romances) and replaced Persian as the informal language of the Muslim elite. According to Mir Taqi Mir, "Urdu was the language of Hindustan by the authority of the King."