Bengali, also called Bengali, Bangla, Bangla-bhasa, belongs to the eastern group of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Like Assamese, it is the easternmost of all Indo-European languages. The Bengalis themselves call it "Bangla", which means "low".
The direct ancestors of the Bengali language are Prakrit and Sanskrit. The total number of Bengali speakers worldwide is 189 million, making it the seventh most spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese.
Where is Bengali spoken?
- Bangladesh. Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh. Here, Bengali is the native language of 106 million people, and another 20 million people in this country also speak it.
- India. Bengali is one of the 23 official languages of India. Here it is the second most important language after Hindi, it is spoken by 82.5 million inhabitants of the country. It is official in three states of India: West Bengal, Tripur and Assam. In addition to these states, Bengali is spoken in Jharkhand, Janbad, Manbhum, Singbhum, Santal Pargana, Orissa,Bihar and Goalpare.
Besides the above countries, Bengali is spoken in Nepal and Pakistan. Bengali speakers are also found in the Middle East, Europe, USA and Canada.
Dialects
Colloquial Bengali can be described as a collection of different dialects, some of them quite different from each other. The standard form of Bengali spoken in Bangladesh and West Bengal is based on the West Central dialect spoken by the educated people of Calcutta as early as the 19th century. Often people who speak Bengali know and use both the common colloquial form and the dialect of their region.
Furthermore, two styles coexist side by side in Bengali: a conservative, highly literary style borrowed heavily from Sanskrit, as well as an informal everyday language.
Grammar
A simple sentence in Bengali usually has the following structure: subject-object-verb. In the present tense, the negative particle is placed at the end of the sentence. The copula or verb linking the subject and the verb is often omitted. There are 10 verb tenses (in general, there are 3 of them, but they are divided into separate forms), 6 cases, 2 moods (imperative and indicative), there are faces (1st, 2nd and 3rd person are expressed through six forms, since there are formal and informal types of address), there is no grammatical gender. Adjectives generally do not change according to number or case.
Writing
Bengaliwriting originates in Brahmi, one of two types of ancient Indian writing, and especially from its eastern variety. The Bengali script followed a different line of development than the Devanagari and Oriya scripts, however, the nature of the Bengali and Assamese scripts is basically the same. By the 12th century A. D., the Bengali alphabet was practically established, although some natural changes continued until the 16th century, and in the 19th century, several amendments were made on purpose.
Bengali is written from left to right. There are no capital letters. The letter is characterized by many connections, various movements up and down from the horizontal line. All but one of the punctuation marks are from 19th century English.
Bengali spelling was more or less standardized through a series of reforms initiated by the University of Calcutta in 1936. However, the standardization process continued for a long time, until the beginning of the 21st century. For example, the Bangla Academy in Dhaka is guided by the 1936 reforms in writing, while the Bangla Academy in West Bengal has proposed a number of its own changes. Vishwa Bharati University, founded by Bengali poet and Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, also uses several of its own spellings. Finally, some newspapers and publications also use their own corporate identity. Not surprisingly, such actions by various organizations have created some confusion.
Glossary
Bengali vocabularyis a mixture of native Bengali words and borrowings from Sanskrit and other neighboring languages such as Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Burmese and some indigenous Austroasiatic languages of Bangladesh. The history of invasions from Persia and the Middle East has led to multiple borrowings from Turkish, Arabic and Persian. And European colonization brought borrowings from English, Portuguese, French and Dutch into the language.
| Hello | ei je, nomosker, assalumu alyikum |
| Goodbye | assi |
| Thank you | dhonyobad |
| Please | doya kore |
| Sorry | māf korben |
| Yes | ha |
| No | na |
| Man | purus, manus |
| Woman | nari, mohila |
The above are a few words to help you have a simple conversation in Bengali.
