Bengali language Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1999, UNESCO recognised 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the language movement. The Bengali language movement from 1948 to 1956 demanding that Bengali be an official language of Pakistan fostered Bengali nationalism in East Bengal leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. Bengali was accorded the status of a classical language by the Government of India on 3 October 2024. 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.

In this sense, all nouns in Bengali, unlike most other Indo-European languages, are similar to mass nouns. Wh-questions are formed by fronting the wh-word to focus position, which is typically the first or second word in the utterance. Bengali makes use of postpositions, as opposed to the prepositions used in English and most European languages. As a head-final language, Bengali follows a subject–object–verb word order, although variations on this theme are common.

Bangla Basics

• For example, the graph মি mi represents the consonant m followed by the vowel i, where i is represented as the diacritical allograph ি (called ই-কার i-kar) and is placed before the default consonant sign.
• Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali Reformer, also wrote a “Grammar of the Bengali Language.” (1832).
• Although it was at times used for oration, Sadhubhasa was not the language of daily communication.
• Consonant conjuncts are simplified in loan words in spoken language.

The ittefaq, which had retained the sadhu form, has also started using the chalita form since 2001. Since March 1965, many Bangla newspapers have adopted the chalita form, discarding the sadhu one. The mix of sadhu and chalita, as used in poetry, has been on the wane since World War II, giving way to the chalita form only. Although the main peculiarity of the colloquial stream is the shortened form of verbs and pronouns, their real difference is in temperament. Chaste language continued to be used in contemporary newspapers, works of documentation and in statements by the government and on matters of serious import. The importance of the colloquial form arose at the beginning of the 20th century but the use of chaste Bangla did not disappear totally.

Languages written with the Eastern Nagari (Bengali) alphabet

The West-Central dialects (Rarhi or Nadia dialect) form the basis of modern standard colloquial Bengali. Modern Bengali vocabulary is based on words inherited from Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, along with tatsamas and reborrowings from Sanskrit and borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Austroasiatic languages and other languages with which it has historically been in contact. Modern Bengali shows a high degree of diglossia, with the literary and standard form differing greatly from the colloquial speech of the regions that identify with the language. 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. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written by Tagore in this language.

In Sylhet and Bankura, modified versions of the Kaithi script had some historical prominence, mainly among Muslim communities. 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 BanglaBet 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. In these ligatures, the shapes of the constituent consonant signs are often contracted and sometimes even distorted beyond recognition.

Some variants of Bengali, particularly Chittagonian and Chakma Bengali, have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker’s voice can distinguish words. Linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterjee grouped these dialects into four large clusters—Radh, Banga, Kamarupa and Varendra; but many alternative grouping schemes have also been proposed. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore. It was made an official language of Sierra Leone in order to honor the Bangladeshi peacekeeping force from the United Nations stationed there.