Abstract:

Although Persian was the official language of the Mughal Empire, members of the administrative and military classes continued speaking Chagatay Turkic among themselves as a sign of identity. In order to have their children learn Chagatay Turkic as well, they had many Chagatay dictionaries, grammars and language learning books with Persian instructions written. One of the most prominent characteristics of these works is that they demonstrate newly emerging lexical items and explain a number of Turkic and Turkicised lexical elements with new meanings. In this article, by analysing four Chagatay dictionaries including Niṣāb-ı Ḳutbiyye, Niṣāb-ı Türkī der Luġat, Niṣāb-ı Türkī and Zübdetü’l-Esmāʾi’t-Türkiyye, written in Mughal India, I explore the lexical items concerning the state administration and military organisation as a semantic substratum and explain the unfamiliar and original lexical units and semantic formations in them. Some of the lexicon that appears in these dictionaries were either not used or had a very limited use in the administrative or military systems of previous Turkic or Islamic states. They also provide certain old lexical items that gained new meanings during the period of the Mughals. An important part of the administrative and military lexis used in the Moghul State, as well as those used in the Timurid period, are of Mongolian origin.

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