ABP Ananda LIVE TV এবিপি আনন্দ লাইভ টিভি

Bengali has minimal gender distinctions compared to other Indo-Aryan languages. Bengali vowels are the building blocks of pronunciation. Our interactive guide helps you master each letter with proper pronunciation. The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three types of contact. Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words (e.g. আট বিড়াল aṭ biṛal instead of আটটা বিড়াল aṭ-ṭa biṛal “eight cats”) would typically be considered ungrammatical.

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, banglabet-bd.com/login 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.

About Bengali Language – The Sweet Language of 300 Million People

In these ligatures, the shapes of the constituent consonant signs are often contracted and sometimes even distorted beyond recognition. The Bengali consonant clusters (যুক্তব্যঞ্জন juktôbênjôn) are usually realised as ligatures, where the consonant which comes first is put on top of or to the left of the one that immediately follows. In addition to the inherent-vowel-suppressing hôsôntô, three more diacritics are commonly used in Bengali. The abugida nature of Bengali consonant graphemes is not consistent, however. This diacritic, however, is not common and is chiefly employed as a guide to pronunciation.

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 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. There are cases where speakers of Standard Bengali in West Bengal will use a different word from a speaker of Standard Bengali in Bangladesh, even though both words are of native Bengali descent.

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.

When a definite article such as -টা -ṭa (singular) or -গুলো -gulo (plural) is added, as in the tables below, nouns are also inflected for number. 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.

• 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.
• After close contact with several indigenous Austroasiatic languages, and later the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, and the Mughal Empire, whose court language was Persian, numerous Arabic, Persian, and Chaghatai words were absorbed into the lexicon.
• Transliteration is orthographically accurate (i.e. the original spelling can be recovered), whereas transcription is phonetically accurate (the pronunciation can be reproduced).
• 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.
• The 3rd article of the Constitution of Bangladesh states Bengali to be the sole official language of Bangladesh.

Other dialects, with minor variations from Standard Colloquial, are used in other parts of West Bengal and western Bangladesh, such as the Midnapore dialect, characterised by some unique words and constructions. Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. In the dialects prevalent in much of eastern and south-eastern Bangladesh (Barisal, Chittagong, Dhaka and Sylhet Divisions of Bangladesh), many of the stops and affricates heard in West Bengal and western Bangladesh are pronounced as fricatives. 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.

Official status

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 adopted many words from Arabic and Persian, which was a manifestation of Islamic culture on the language.

Use flashcards for vocabulary

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.