The Persian language influenced the formation of many modern languages of all of West Asia, Europe, Central Asia, and South Asian regions, including the South Asian language Urdu. Following the Turko-Persian Ghaznavid conquest of South Asia, the speech based in Delhi’s Khariboli and other dialects of the South Asia received a large influx of Persian, Turkish and Arabic vocabulary, as well as a limited number of grammatical patterns from these languages. This lexically hybrid language was called Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla (‘language of the exalted (army) camp’) to distinguish it from Farsi, the court language, and was later shortened to just Urdu. It grew from the interaction of Persian and Turkic speaking Muslim soldiers and the native peoples. Under Persian influence from the state, the Persian script and Nasta’liq form of cursive writing was adopted, with additional figures added to accommodate the Indo-Aryan phonetic system. Urdu is grammatically an Indo-Aryan language, written in the Perso-Arabic script, and contains literary conventions and specialized vocabulary largely from Persian. Some grammatical elements peculiar to Persian, such as the enclitic ezāfe, and the use of the takhallus, were readily absorbed into Urdu literature both in the religious and secular spheres. Urdu soon gained distinction in literary and cultural spheres in South Asia because of the hybrid nature of the language, producing a distinct Indo-Persian blending. A famous cross-over writer was Amir Khusro, whose Persian and Urdu couplets are to this day read in South Asia. Allama Iqbal was also a prominent South Asian writer who wrote in Persian and Urdu.