Bengali language Wikipedia

The letters run from left to right and spaces are used to separate orthographic words. While most writing is in Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), spoken dialects exhibit a greater variety. For example, the word salt is লবণ lôbôṇ in the east which corresponds to নুন nun in the west. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia and Kushtia District. Similarly, Hajong is considered a separate language, although it shares similarities to Northern Bengali dialects. In Pakistan, Bengali is a recognised secondary language in the city of Karachi mainly spoken by stranded Bengalis of Pakistan.

Bengali Vowels (স্বরবর্ণ – Shororborno) – 11 Essential Sounds

Later, East Asian travellers and lately European colonialism brought words from Portuguese, French, Dutch, and most significantly English during the colonial period.citation needed Persian influence was significant for the development of Bengali up to the modern day, and was the primary official language in the region for 600 years, until British rule, when it was changed to English in 1836. More recent studies suggest that the use of foreign words has been increasing, mainly because of the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style.

Bengali Consonants (ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ – Benjonborno) – 39 Essential Letters

Two of these, /oi̯/ and /ou̯/, are the only ones with representation in script, as ঐ and ঔ respectively. Bengali is known for its wide variety of diphthongs, combinations of vowels occurring within the same syllable. The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one variety – often, speakers are fluent in Cholitobhasha (SCB) and one or more banglabet-bet.com/login regional dialects. Some dialects, particularly those of the Chittagong region, bear only a superficial resemblance to SCB. However, a majority in Bangladesh speaks dialects notably different from SCB.

• Bengali nouns are not assigned gender, which leads to minimal changing of adjectives (inflection).
• There is also the classifier -khana, and its diminutive form -khani, which attaches only to nouns denoting something flat, long, square, or thin.
• Some varieties of Bengali, particularly Sylheti, Chittagonian and Chakma, have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker’s voice can distinguish words.
• However, nouns and pronouns are moderately declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated, and the verbs do not change form depending on the number of the noun.

Browse complete list of words Stay up to date on the latest lesson with a free newsletter from us. Bengali has different dialects in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

The potential influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Eastern Bengali is used to explain the lack of nasalised vowels and an alveolar articulation of what are categorised as the “cerebral” consonants (as opposed to the postalveolar articulation of western Bengal). The Bengali-Assamese script is an abugida, a script with letters for consonants, with diacritics for vowels, and in which an inherent vowel (অ ô) is assumed for consonants if no vowel is marked. These 39 consonants combine with vowels to create all Bengali words. According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji, dictionaries from the early 20th century attributed a little more than 50% of the Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e., naturally modified Sanskrit words, corrupted forms of Sanskrit words, and loanwords non-Indo-European languages).

The varieties of Prakrit spoken in Bengal region were generally referred to as “eastern Magadhi Prakrit”, as coined by linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, as the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects were influential in the first millennium when Bengal was a part of the Greater Magadhan realm. It is the second most spoken and fifth fastest growing language in India, following Hindi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, and Meitei (Manipuri), according to the 2011 census of India. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states including Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha and Uttarakhand. Bengali is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language. With over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million as second language speakers as of 2025, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world. I am so clever that sometimes I do not understand a single word of what I am saying.

Small numbers of people in Midnapore, which borders Odisha, have used the Odia script to write in Bengali. Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the downstroke । daṛi – the Bengali equivalent of a full stop – have been adopted from Western scripts and their usage is similar. Although there exist a few visual formulas to construct some of these ligatures, many of them have to be learned by rote. As in, ক্ষ (ক+ষ) or হ্ম (হ+ম) In the Bengali writing system, there are nearly 285 such ligatures denoting consonant clusters.

Nouns and pronouns are inflected for case, including nominative, objective, genitive (possessive), and locative. Additionally, optional particles (e.g. কি -ki, না -na, etc.) are often encliticised onto the first or last word of a yes–no question. Yes–no questions do not require any change to the basic word order; instead, the low (L) tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling (HL) tone.

Learn regional variations

Furthermore, the inherent vowel is often not pronounced at the end of a syllable, as in কম kɔm “less”, but this omission is not generally reflected in the script, making it difficult for the new reader. But the script is fairly opaque for phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, i.e., it is often quite difficult to predict the spelling from the pronunciation of the words. After the Partition of India in the 20th century, the Pakistani government attempted to institute the Perso-Arabic script as the standard for Bengali in East Pakistan; this was met with resistance and contributed to the Bengali language movement. Throughout history, there have been instances of the Bengali language being written in different scripts, though these employments were never popular on a large scale and were communally limited.

Bengali is also spoken by the Bengali diasporas (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) across Europe, North America, the Middle East and other regions. It is also the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. It is primarily spoken by the Bengali people, native to the Bengal region (Bangladesh, India’s West Bengal) as well as in Barak Valley in Assam and Tripura in South Asia. Bengali,a also known by its endonym Bangla,b is a classical Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.