Dakhni

Dakhni, also called Deccani, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Deccan plateau, born from Hindustani speech carried south from Delhi. In 1327 Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq moved his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad; after the Bahmani Sultanate was founded in 1347 the transplanted dialect became the region's lingua franca and took its name from the Deccan.

Persian supplied learned vocabulary, while contact with Marathi, Kannada and Telugu added local words and shaped its sounds. Sufi preachers spread it, and the earliest surviving manuscript, Kadam Rao Padam Rao, was composed around Bidar.

From the early sixteenth century the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda made Dakhni a literary language: Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah wrote secular poetry in it and Ibrahim Adil Shah II composed his Book of the Nine Rasas in Dakhni. This tradition later fed the rise of standard Urdu.