page_title: Mughal Empire
section_title: Language
hierarchical_section_title: Mughal Empire / Culture / Language
context_page_description: The Mughal Empire or Mogul Empire, self-designated as Gurkani, was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. For some two centuries, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan plateau in south India.
  The Mughal empire is conventionally said to have been founded in 1526 by Babur, a warrior chieftain from what today is Uzbekistan, who employed aid from the neighboring Safavid and Ottoman empires, to defeat the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodhi, in the First Battle of Panipat, and to sweep down the plains of Upper India. The Mughal imperial structure, however, is sometimes dated to 1600, to the rule of Babur's grandson, Akbar. This imperial structure lasted until 1720, until shortly after the death of the last major emperor, Aurangzeb, during whose reign the empire also achieved its maximum geographical extent.
context_section_description: Although Persian was the dominant and "official" language of the empire, the language of the elite was a Persianised form of Hindustani called Urdu. The language was written in a type of Perso-Arabic script known as Nastaliq, and with literary conventions and specialised vocabulary borrowed from Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages; the dialect was eventually given its own name of Urdu. The Mughals spoke what later became known as Urdu, and by the year 1700, the Mughals had formalized the language.
caption: The phrase Zuban-i Urdū-yi Muʿallá ("Language of the exalted Horde") written in Nastaʿlīq script.
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