Awadhi

Awadhis are the Indo-Aryan people of Awadh, the Gangetic plain around Lucknow and Ayodhya, corresponding to ancient Kosala, whose name survives in the dialect's older label Kosali.

From 1350 their country passed in turn through the Delhi Sultanate, the Sharqi Sultans of Jaunpur, who held it from 1394 to 1478, and then the Mughals, who incorporated it under Humayun around 1555 and made it the Subah of Awadh. Awadhi, alongside Braj, was then one of the great literary languages of north India: the sixteenth-century poet Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, carrying the speech of Ayodhya across the subcontinent.

As Mughal Delhi weakened, the Persian adventurer Saadat Khan became governor in 1722 and founded the line of the Nawabs of Awadh, ruling from Faizabad and later Lucknow; their court made the region a centre of poetry, music and Shi'a learning until standard Hindi began to displace Awadhi from formal writing in the mid-nineteenth century.