<P> The difficulty of pronouncing the name for his Central Asian Turco - Mongol army may have been responsible for the greater popularity of his nickname Babur, also variously spelled Baber, Babar, and Bābor . The name is generally taken in reference to the Persian babr, meaning "tiger". The word repeatedly appears in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh and was borrowed into the Turkic languages of Central Asia . Thackston argues for an alternate derivation from the PIE word "beaver", pointing to similarities between the pronunciation Bābor and the Russian bobr (бобр, "beaver"). </P> <P> Babur bore the royal titles Badshah and al - ṣultānu' l - ʿazam wa' l - ḫāqān al - mukkarram pādshāh - e ġāzī . He and later Mughal emperors used the title of mirza when they were princes (see imperial and royal titles of the Mughal emperors). </P> <P> Babur's memoirs form the main source for details of his life . They are known as the Baburnama and were written in Chaghatai Turkic, his mother - tongue, though, according to Dale, "his Turkic prose is highly Persianized in its sentence structure, morphology or word formation and vocabulary ." Baburnama was translated into Persian during the rule of Babur's grandson Akbar . </P> <P> Babur was born on 14 February 1483 in the city of Andijan, Andijan Province, Fergana Valley, contemporary Uzbekistan . He was the eldest son of Umar Sheikh Mirza, ruler of the Fergana Valley, the son of Abū Saʿīd Mirza (and grandson of Miran Shah, who was himself son of Timur) and his wife Qutlugh Nigar Khanum, daughter of Yunus Khan, the ruler of Moghulistan (and great - great grandson of Tughlugh Timur, the son of Esen Buqa I, who was the great - great - great grandson of Chaghatai Khan, the second - born son of Genghis Khan). </P>

What was the mother tongue of the mughals