Hindustani

Hindustani, or Hindi-Urdu, is the Indo-Aryan lingua franca of the plain of northern India. It grew out of the Middle Indo-Aryan Apabhraṃśa vernaculars of the seventh to thirteenth centuries and took shape under the Delhi Sultanate, when its Prakrit base absorbed Persian, Arabic and Turkic words.

The thirteenth-century poet Amir Khusrau wrote in it and called it Hindavi, the language of Delhi, and Sufi teachers carried it through the subcontinent; in the Deccan it developed a southern branch called Dakhani. The name Urdu came into use around 1780.

It has two literary registers: Hindi, written in Devanagari and drawn toward Sanskrit, and Urdu, written in the Persian Nastaliq hand and steeped in Persian vocabulary. A grammar printed by the East India Company scholar John Gilchrist in 1796 codified it for British administration.