Hindi, the official language of India, is closely related to Urdu, the national language of Pakistan. Which of these two was the language of the court of the Mughal Empire?

These two varieties of Hindustani language are nearly identical in basic structure and grammar, and at a colloquial level also in vocabulary and phonology. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts, which rely on educated vocabulary drawn from different sources; Hindi drawing its specialised vocabulary from Sanskrit, whilst Urdu (used on the Muslim court) does so from Persian and Arabic.