Learn Bangla Quick Online Learning
Bengali is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand, and sizeable minorities of Bengali speakers reside in Indian cities outside Bengal, including Delhi, Mumbai, Thane, Varanasi, and Vrindavan. Besides the native region it is also spoken by the Bengalis living in Tripura, southern Assam and the Bengali population in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In 2024, the government of India conferred Bengali with the status of classical language. However, in 2022, the UN did adopt Bangla as an unofficial language, after a resolution tabled by India. In 2010, the parliament of Bangladesh and the legislative assembly of West Bengal proposed that Bengali be made an official UN language. In 1948, the government of Pakistan tried to impose Urdu as the sole state language in Pakistan, giving rise to the Bengali language movement.
Bauls call for social movement to preserve Bengali culture
In fact, Bengali-Assamese script has the deepest orthography (deep orthography) among the Indian scripts. The Bengali script in general has a comparatively shallow orthography when compared to the Latin script used for English and French, i.e., in many cases there is a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds (phonemes) and the letters (graphemes) of Bengali. Though the Portuguese standard did not receive much growth, a few Roman Bengali works relating to Christianity and Bengali grammar were printed as far as Lisbon in 1743. In the 16th century, Portuguese missionaries began a tradition of using the Roman alphabet to transcribe the Bengali language. The variant in Sylhet was identical to the Baitali Kaithi script of Hindustani with the exception of Sylhet Nagri possessing matra.
Can I view this page in Bengali language?
- Other related languages in the nearby region also make use of the Bengali script like the Meitei language in the Indian state of Manipur, where the Meitei language has been written in the Bengali script for centuries, though the Meitei script has been promoted in recent times.
- These symbols do not, however, always represent the spoken sound of the language.
- Published under the imprint of Benglish Books, these are based on phonetic transliteration and closely follow spellings used in social media but for using an underline to describe soft consonants.
- Handles meaning, tone, and nuance — essential for languages like Bengali.
- In the early phase of medieval Bangla, the half-vowels i (ই্) and u (উ্ ) started weakening; 2.
Bengali exhibits diglossia between the written and spoken forms of the language; two styles of writing, involving somewhat different vocabularies and syntax, have emerged. 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). Bengali exhibits diglossia, though some scholars have proposed triglossia or even n-glossia or heteroglossia between the written and spoken forms of the language. The local Apabhraṃśa of the eastern subcontinent, Purbi Apabhraṃśa or Abahatta (lit. ’meaningless sounds’), eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three groups, the Bengali–Assamese languages, the Bihari languages, and the Odia language.
The script has been adopted for writing the Sylheti language as well, replacing the use of the old Sylheti Nagori script. Meitei, a Sino-Tibetan language used in the Indian state of Manipur, has been written in the Bengali bangla bet abugida for centuries, though Meitei Mayek (the Meitei abugida) has been promoted in recent times. In spite of some modifications in the nineteenth century, the Bengali spelling system continues to be based on the one used for Sanskrit, and thus does not take into account some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language. For example, in মই moj “ladder” and in ইলিশ iliʃ “Hilsa fish,” the independent form of the vowel ই is used (cf. the dependent form ি).
Knowing this fact, some interesting cases of apparent vowel length distinction can be found. In yes-no questions, the rising tones may be more exaggerated, and most importantly, the final syllable of the final word in the sentence takes a high falling tone instead of a flat low tone. This intonation pattern extends to wh-questions, as wh-words are normally considered to be focused.
Almost all the cases of silent letters existing in Bengali are found in the tatsam words.The Bengali writing system, therefore, is often not a true guide for pronunciation. So when these Sanskrit words re-entered the Bengali vocabulary as tatsam words, their pronunciations were modified, but their spellings were retained. By the 19th century, the Bengali phonology had diverged a lot from Sanskrit phonology and had lost many of the consonant clusters used in Sanskrit. Thus, same letters and graphemes can often have different pronunciations depending on their position in a word and different graphemes and letters often have the same pronunciation.