Early forms of present day Hindustani emerged from the
Middle Indo-Aryan apabhramsha vernaculars of
North India in the 7th–13th centuries CE.
[15] Amir Khusro, who lived in the 13th century CE during the
Delhi Sultanate period in North India, used these forms (which was the lingua franca of the period) in his writings and referred to the language as
Hindavi.
[15] The Delhi Sultanate, which comprised several
Turkic and
Persian dynasties that ruled from Delhi, was succeeded by the
Mughal Empire in 1526.
Although the Mughals were of
Timurid (
Gurkānī)
Turko-Mongol descent,
[16] they were
Persianized, and Persian had gradually become the state language of the Mughal empire after
Babur.
[17][18][19][20]
Towards the end of the Mughal period, with the fragmentation of the empire and the elite system, a variant of
Khariboli, one of the successors of apabhramsha vernaculars at
Delhi, and nearby cities, came to gradually replace Persian as the lingua franca among the educated elite
upper class particularly in northern India, though Persian still retained much of its pre-eminence. The term
Hindustani (literally "of
Hindustan") was the name given to that variant of Khariboli.
For socio-political reasons, though essentially the variant of
Khariboli with Persian vocabulary, the emerging
prestige dialect became also known as
Urdu (properly
zabān-e Urdu-e mo'alla "language of the court" or
zabān-e Urdu زبان اردو, ज़बान-ए उर्दू, "language of the camp" in Persian, derived from
Turkic Ordū "camp", cognate with English
horde; due to its origin as the common speech of the Mughal army). The more highly Persianized version later established as a language of the court was called
Rekhta, or "mixed".