Old Hindi

• 1. Introduction

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  Old Hindi, also called Khariboli, was the tongue spoken around Delhi roughly between the 12th and 14th centuries. From that single regional dialect grew two of South Asia's most widely spoken languages today: Modern Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu. How did a language tied to the courts of the Delhi Sultanate branch into such distinct and far-reaching descendants? And why do we know so little about what it actually sounded like? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Roots in Prakrit

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  Old Hindi grew from Shauraseni Prakrit, one of the middle Indo-Aryan languages that preceded it in the region. Prakrit languages were themselves descendants of Sanskrit and served as the spoken vernaculars of ordinary people across the Indian subcontinent for centuries. The version that gave rise to Old Hindi was associated with the Shurasena region, a territory whose heartland sat near the same stretch of the Gangetic plain that would later be anchored by Delhi. Some scholars extend the roots further back, pointing to Apabhramsha poetry as early as 769 AD, specifically the Dohakosh composed by Siddha Sarahapad. That claim remains contested and is not generally accepted among linguists.

• 3. Persian and the Sultanate

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  During the period of Muslim rule in India, Old Hindi began absorbing loanwords from Persian. That borrowing was not accidental. The Delhi Sultanate, which governed the region during the 12th-14th centuries, operated in Persian as its administrative and literary language. Persian prestige meant Persian vocabulary filtered steadily into the local vernacular. The word Hindi itself reflects this contact: in Classical Persian it simply means Indian, and the language was also called Hindustani to mark it as the tongue of Hindustan's capital under the Sultanate. Over time, the Prakritic base of Old Hindi fused with this Persian layer, and Hindustani emerged as the result.

• 4. Voices in the Record

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  Old Hindi survives in only a handful of literary works, and the voices preserved there are strikingly varied. The Indo-Persian Muslim poet Amir Khusrau left some of the clearest examples. Alongside him, the Vaishnava Hindu poet Namdev contributed verses, and the Sufi Muslim Baba Farid composed lines that were later collected in the Adi Granth. The Bhakti Hindu poet Kabir may also be counted among Old Hindi's witnesses, though the dialect he used is described as Khariboli-like rather than unambiguously identical. That four writers from such different religious and cultural backgrounds all drew on the same spoken base suggests the language belonged to no single community. The script was not uniform either: Hindi languages were originally written in different variants of Nagari, and later in the Arabic script in the Nastaliq calligraphy style.

• 5. A Name Coined in Hindsight

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  Nobody who spoke Old Hindi called it that. The term was coined retrospectively by scholars seeking a label for the ancestral stage of Modern Standard Hindi, which today holds the status of an official language of the government of India. The name Dehlavi, meaning of Delhi, was another designation used historically to identify the same speech, pointing directly to its geographic core. What makes this naming history revealing is what it says about how languages get studied: a dialect becomes a language once it produces something worth preserving, and its earlier stages get names only after the descendant has become important enough to need an origin story.