Dehlavi

The Dehlavi are the people of Delhi and the Upper Doab, the fertile Ganges-Yamuna strip, long the political heartland of northern India. Their speech, Dehlavi, also called Hindavi or Old Hindi, descended from Shauraseni Prakrit and was the local dialect of the Delhi Sultanate, used by its Persian-speaking rulers with their subjects; its earliest literary echoes appear in Amir Khusro's verses around 1300.

Under the Mughals the Persianised Dehlavi of camps and bazaars around Delhi and Agra developed into Rekhta, the literary tongue of Urdu; the same dialect, later called Khariboli, became the base of Standard Hindi, making Dehlavi the common ancestor of both registers of Hindustani.

Delhi remained the seat of Mughal power until the empire's eighteenth-century decline: Nadir Shah sacked the city in 1739, and Afghans and Marathas contested it before the East India Company took Delhi and the Doab in 1803, after which Fort William College in Calcutta promoted the Delhi dialect as the standard of modern Hindustani.