Malvi

Malvi is an Indo-Aryan language of the Rajasthani group, spoken chiefly on the Malwa plateau of western Madhya Pradesh and adjoining Rajasthan. Together with kindred varieties it forms part of the Western Indo-Aryan continuum that grew out of the early medieval Prakrits; references to a distinct Rajasthani speech go back to the eighth century.

When the Malwa Sultanate was founded in 1401, and again after the region became a Mughal province in 1562, Persian served as the language of court and administration. Malvi remained in towns and villages, absorbing Persian and Arabic loanwords. It has remained largely a language of home, market and oral poetry.

Malvi is written in the Devanagari script. In earlier centuries Rajasthani tongues were commonly recorded in Mahajani, a mercantile script also used for accounts and financial records.