Deccani (also known as Deccani Urdu and Deccani Hindi or Dakni, Dakhni, Dakhini, Dakkhani and Dakkani, is a variety of Hindustani spoken in the Deccan region of India: the plateau extending across what is today south-central India.
Commonly associated with Urdu, the historical dialect sparked the development of Urdu literature during the late-Mughal period, and was a predecessor to and later influenced modern standard Hindi. It arose as a lingua franca under the Delhi and Bahmani Sultanates, as trade and migration from the north introduced Hindustani to Southern India. It later developed a literary tradition under the patronage of the Deccan Sultanates.
Along with Persian, Dakhni was a major literary language of the Deccan Sultanates, the kingdoms that ruled the area surrounding today’s Hyderabad from the fourteenth to the late seventeenth century.
The Mughal conquest of the Deccan by Aurangzeb in the 17th century connected the southern regions of the subcontinent to the north, and introduced a hegemony of northern tastes. This began the decline of Deccani poetry, as literary patronage in the region decreased. Standardized Urdu evolved in Delhi in the 17th century in Delhi’s Shajahanabad.
Urdu came to the south after the Mughals fully conquered the Deccan, after Hyderabad (Golconda Sultanate) was the last kingdom to fall in 1687. The entire Deccan eventually came under the Mughal-appointed Nizams in 1724 (with Aurangabad as its capital), who first made Persian and later Urdu the official language replacing Dakhni, which however continues to be a spoken language, till today.
Modern Dakhni resembles standard Urdu but is distinguished by the use of distinct words and phrases. Deccani differs from Hindustani due to archaisms retained from the medieval era, as well as convergence with regional languages like Marathi, Telugu and Kannada spoken in the states of Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
Dakhni’s origins go back to the mid 14th century when ‘Dehalvi’, northern India’s spoken idiom, mixed with Marathi first when Mohammed Bin Tughlaq decided to shift his capital from Delhi to Daulatabad (in Aurangabad today) in the late 1320s. Words like ‘Kaiku’, ‘Nakko’, ‘Manjhe’, ‘Haula’, etc, are all imports from other regional languages (Marathi, Kannada, Telugu).
The claim of Dakhni being dialect of Urdu is mainly due to script. The grammar, sentence formation, pronunciation is very different.
The main characteristic is the presence of Dravidian language influence which is fully missing from Urdu.
Areas where Deccani is spoken
Language is not a static entity rather dynamic. The birth, growth and death of languages includes multiple sources and reasons.