Old Hindi

Old Hindi, also known as Khariboli, was the earliest stage of the Hindustani language, and so the ancestor of today's Hindi and Urdu. It developed from Shauraseni, and was spoken by the peoples of the region around Delhi, in roughly the 10th–13th centuries before the Delhi Sultanate.

During the Muslim rule in India, Old Hindi began acquiring loanwords from Persian language, which led to the development of Hindustani. It is attested in only a handful of works of literature, including some works by the Indo-Persian Muslim poet Amir Khusrau, verses by the Vaishnava Hindu poet Namdev, and some verses by the Sufi Muslim Baba Farid in the Adi Granth. The works of Bhakti Hindu poet Kabir also may be included, as he used a Khariboli-like dialect. Old Hindi was originally written in the Brahmic script in Devanagari calligraphy and also in the Arabic script as well, in Nastaliq calligraphy.

Some scholars include Apabhraṃśa poetry as early as 769 AD (Dohakosh by Siddha Sarahapad) within Old Hindi, but this is not generally accepted.

With loanwords from Persian added to Old Hindi's Prakritic base, the language evolved into Hindustani, which further developed into the present-day standardised varieties of Hindi and Urdu.

The term Old Hindi is a retrospectively coined term, to indicate the ancestor language of Modern Standard Hindi, which is an official language of the government of India along with English. The term Hindi literally means Indian in Classical Persian, and was also called Hindustani to denote that it was the language of Hindustan's capital during the Delhi Sultanate.