Bengali is a language spoken in eastern India and Bangladesh with nearly 200 million native speakers. It has two writing systems and draws heavily on Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Turkish vocabulary. Bengali is part of the Indo-Aryan language family and has a rich literary tradition, including Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore. The language has had a tumultuous history, including a protest in 1952 over the decision to make Urdu the sole national language of Pakistan.
Bengali is a language spoken throughout eastern India and Bangladesh. It has nearly 200 million native speakers, making it the seventh most natively spoken language on Earth. Although the term Bengali is still widely used around the world, the native word for the language is Bangla and it is beginning to enter common English usage.
There are two major stylistic systems of writing used in Bengali. The first, Shadhubhasha, is based on an older form of Bengali and is mainly used only in extremely formal situations or in some literary contexts. The second, Choltibhasha, is used much more widely, and in fact the word itself means something like ‘common speech’. The current standardized form of written Bengali dates back to the late 18th century, when an Englishman, Sir Charles Wilkins, created the first printing press for the Bengali language. The alphabet is also used for a number of other languages, including some Sino-Tibetian languages such as Manipuri and Garo.
Like Mandarin and many other languages spoken across a wide geographic area, Bengali dialects span a dialect continuum. This means that although speakers of a dialect are likely to be able to understand their neighbors – and even their neighbors’ neighbors – as the distance increases, it becomes likely that speakers will be unable to understand anything other than few words of other dialects. There is a somewhat standardized form of Bengali based on a dialect of the Calcutta region, but the extent to which it is truly universal is limited.
Bengali derives from the ancient Sanskrit language and much of its vocabulary is taken directly from Sanskrit. What is usually referred to as Classical Sanskrit was first spoken in India over 2,500 years ago, and its influence on Indian culture and the various languages of India is great. Bengali also draws heavily on Persian, Arabic and Turkish vocabulary, due to the repeated waves of invasion from the Middle East into India.
Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language, part of the larger Indo-European category. Indo-Aryan languages are spoken throughout the Indian subcontinent, as well as some adjacent areas. Some well-known examples include the ancient Sanskrit, Punjabi, Hindi and Urdu language, and even the Nepalese language of Nepal.
Since the 19th century, there has been a great deal of renewed interest by artists in the Bengali language, with the result that many of the great modern works of Indian literature and poetry have been written in Bengali. The iconic example of this trend is Rabindranath Tagore, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. He is responsible for a staggering amount of spectacular poetry, novels, short stories and assorted other writings. He is also the creator of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
The Bengali language has had a somewhat tumultuous recent history, with some incredible movements having sprung up to either protect its status as a national language or help promote its widespread use. The best known of these events was the 1952 protest in Pakistan, in which numerous protesters were killed. The protest was in response to a decision by the Pakistani government to make Urdu the sole national language, even though the majority of Pakistan’s population spoke Bengali.
Protect your devices with Threat Protection by NordVPN
