| Summary: | <p style="text-align:justify;"> Hindi, including its older version, has been used by Indian Muslims in various contexts from at least the seventh/thirteenth century. 1. The semantic range of Hindi and its synonyms The term hindī and its more archaic forms, such as hindavī/hindūʾī and hindīya, were first used in Arabic and Persian sources in the sense of “Indian (language).” Their specific meaning, however, was not initially fixed (Chatterji, 35–7). Already in third/ninth-century Arab sources, the term hindiyya referred to the language of India (Flood, 44) but it is unclear what language was meant. … </p>
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