Short answers, pulled from the story.
Scholars trace the language's first written poetry to the Delhi Sultanate era around the twelfth and thirteenth century. Amir Khusrow used these forms in his writings during the thirteenth century.
The term Urdu appeared around 1780 and is believed to have been coined by the poet Mashafi. John Borthwick Gilchrist published A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language in 1796.
As of 2025, Hindi and Urdu together constitute the third-most-spoken language in the world after English and Mandarin. This figure represents 855 million native and second-language speakers according to Ethnologue.
Standard Hindi is usually written in the indigenous Devanagari script of India. Urdu is written in the Nastaliq style of the Urdu alphabet, an extended Perso-Arabic script incorporating Indic phonemes.
The military exploits of Alauddin Khalji introduced the language in the Deccan region by the end of the thirteenth century. This led to the development of its southern dialect known as Deccani during the Delhi Sultanate period.