Like other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali arose from the eastern Middle Indic languages of the Indian subcontinent. This day has now been declared as the International Mother Language Day. In 1952, when Bangladesh was part of East Pakistan, this strong sense of identity led to the Bengali Language Movement, in which several people braved bullets and died on February 21, 1952.

The Bengali language, with its long and rich literary tradition, serves to bind together a culturally diverse region. The Bengali writing system is the Bengali abugida, a cursive script which is a variant of the Eastern Nagari script. Bengali exhibits diglossia between the written and spoken forms of the language two styles of writing, involving somewhat different vocabularies and syntax, have emerged. Similarly, Hajong is considered a separate language, although it shares similarities to Northern Bengali dialects. Rajbangsi, Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-Iranian languages.

Bengali is the primary language spoken in Bangladesh and is the second most widely spoken language in India. With nearly 230 million total speakers, Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages (ranking 6th in the world). Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

More.īengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit languages. Without rendering support you may see irregular vowel positioning and a lack of conjuncts.

Bengali consonants