Through all this, the language of popular exchange remained Hindustani. This was intelligible to Hindi and Urdu speakers, but also to the speakers of most of the major dialects of the Indo-Gangetic plain: Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Maithili, Marwari and so on. However, Hindustani, as well as Hindi and Urdu, were virtually unknown in eastern and southern India. The languages spoken here were Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Tamil and Telugu, each with a script and sophisticated literary tradition of its own.
