One of the idiosyncrasies in Hyderabad is its language – Dakhni. Known as ‘Hyderabadi’, ‘Hyderabadi Hindi’ or even ‘Hyderabadi Urdu’, people in general, in Hyderabad and even the Deccan region, don’t actually know what it is called due to lack of awareness. Many in fact are even unaware that modern Urdu is in fact younger than Dakhni.
Host Yunus Y. Lasania did a three-part mini-series on the history of Dakhni, and how the language has managed to remain as a spoken vernacular over the last few centuries, and even till today. In the first part of the mini-series, Yunus and Karthik Nalli speak about the evolution of Dakhni in the Deccan and how the language forms from the 14th century onwards under the Bahamani Empire which spans parts of Karnataka, Maharashtra and even the Telugu speaking regions of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.