Bengali Language

Bengali, also called Bangala, Bangla, Bangla-Bhasa, belongs to the Eastern group of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. Along with Assamese, it is the easternmost of all Indo-European languages. In English, Bengali refers to both the language and the people who speak it. In Bengali, the language is called Bangla (bangla means ‘low’). The direct ancestors of Bengali are Prakrit, and Sanskrit. The total number of speakers of Bengali worldwide is 189 million (Ethnologue), making it the seventh most spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese (Ethnologue).

Status

Bangladesh

Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh where it is spoken as a first language by 106 million, and as a second language by 20 million speakers. In India, it statutory provincial language in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam states.

India

Bengali is one of the 23 official languages of India, where it is spoken by 82.5 million people and the second most-spoken language after Hindi–Urdu. It is spoken in West Bengal; Tripura; Jharkhand, Dhanbad, Manbhum, Singhbhum, and Santal Parganas; Odisha, Mayar and Bales; Bihar; Assam, and Goalpara district (Ethnologue). It is a statutory provincial language in West Bengal, Tripura, and Assam. In addition to Bangladesh and India, Bengali is spoken in Nepal, Pakistan, the Middle East, Europe, the U.S., and Canada.

Dialects

Spoken Bengali is best described as a continuum of regional dialects. Some of them are not mutually intelligible. The standard form of Bengali, accepted in Bangladesh and in West Bengal, is based on the West-Central dialect as spoken by educated people in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) back in the 19th century. Diglossia is widespread, with many speakers being able to use both formal standard Bengali and their own regional dialect. There are two styles of speaking which exist side-by-side: conservative high-style literary language which frequently uses borrowings from Sanskrit, and informal everyday language.

Structure

Sound system

The sound system of Bengali is fairly typical of Indo-Aryan languages.

Vowels

Bengali has 7 oral vowel phonemes, i.e., sounds that differentiate word meaning. The vowels /i/, /a/, and /u/ can be short or long (i:, a:, u:). Vowel length differentiates word meaning. In addition, vowels can be nasalized.

• /æ/ =a in cat
• /ɔ/ = o in bog

Bengali has a wide variety of vowel combinations. Some consist of a vowel + semivowel occurring in one syllable, while others are vowel + vowel combinations occurring across two syllables.

Consonants

Bengali has 29 consonants. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless and voiced stops. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air. There is also a contrast between and apical vs. retroflex stops and affricates. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth. The use of consonant clusters is extremely limited, even in borrowed words.

• /ʃ/ = sh in shop
• /tʃ/ = ch in chop
• /dʒ/ = j in job
• /ŋ/ = ng in song

Stress

Stress in standard Bengali normally falls on the initial syllable of a word. The position of stress alone does not affect word meaning.

Grammar

Bengali is an inflected language, i.e., it uses prefixes and suffixes to mark grammatical relations and to form words. Bengali typically uses postpositions, rather than prepositions. Postpositions require that the noun take a certain case.

Nouns

Thee are no gender distinctions, but Bengali nouns have the following characteristics:

• Nouns are marked for case: nominative, accusative, genitive, and locative–instrumental.
• There are two numbers: singular and plural. Plural markers are added only to count nouns with animate or definite referents.
• Animacy is marked in the plural.
• Definiteness is marked with post-posited -ţa in the singular, and -gula in the plural for inanimate nouns and –ra for animate nouns, e.g., juta-ţa ‘the shoe‘, juta-gula ‘the shoes’, and chatro-ţa ‘the student’ and chatro-ra ‘the students’.
• Bengali uses classifiers when counting nouns (similar to neighboring South Asian languages), e.g., panch-jon-chatro ‘five-human classifier-students’.
• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. There is no gender distinction in the 3rd person.
• There are three degrees of proximity in the 3rd person (someone who is nearby, someone who is a little further away, and someone who is not present.

Pronouns

• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
• There is no gender distinction in the 3rd person.
• There are three degrees of proximity in the 3rd person: someone who is nearby, someone who is a little further away, and someone who is not present.

Verbs

Bengali verbs agree with their subjects in person and status category.

• There are three persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd).
• There are three status categories in the 2nd person (despective, ordinary, honorific) and two status categories in the 3rd person (ordinary, honorific).
• Verb stems are derived from verbal monosyllabic or disyllabic verbal bases. Markers are combined to produce various mood/aspect/tense combinations;
• There are three moods: indicative, imperative, conditional.
• Ttwo aspects are distinguished: imperfective and perfective.
• Verbs have three tenses: present, past, future.
• Bengali verbs use a post-verbal negative particle.

Word order

The normal word order in Bengali sentences is Subject-Object-Verb. Adjectives and genitive constructions expressing possession precede nouns.

Vocabulary

Bengali vocabulary is a mixture of native Bengali words, and borrowings from Sanskrit, as well as from neighboring languages such as Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Burmese, and several indigenous Austroasiatic languages of Bangladesh. A history of invasions from Persia and the Middle East resulted in many borrowings from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. European colonialism brought borrowings from English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch.

Below are some common words and phrases in Bengali in Latin transcription. ā represents a long /a/.

Below are Bengali numerals 0-10 in an Arabic-based and in Bengali scripts.

Writing

Bengali has a rich literature dating back to 1000 AD. All literature prior to the19th century was in rhymed verse. The writing system of Modern Bengali developed from an ancient Indian syllabary called Brāhmī. Brāhmī is the ancestor of all other Indian scripts, including Devanāgarī, a writing system associated with classical Sanskrit as well as a number of modern Indo-Aryan languages. The Brāhmī alphabet is thought to have been modeled on the Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets. It appeared in India sometime before 500 BC, and was used to write a variety of languages, including Sanskrit and Prakrit. The present form of the Bengali script was standardized In 1778 to facilitate printing. It has 12 vowel and 52 consonant characters.

Like all Brāhmī-derived scripts, Bengali is written from left to right with the characters hanging from a horizontal line. No distinction is made between upper and lower case characters. The Bengali alphabet is written with a syllable-based system in which all consonants have an inherent vowel which is not always predictable, and sometimes, is not pronounced at all. Special diacritics are used to represent a single consonant or a single vowel.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Bengali and in transliteration. Note use of vertical lines to mark the end of sentences.

Did You Know?

English has borrowed a few words from Bengali . Below are two of them.

Difficulty

Language Difficulty

How difficult is it to learn Bengali?
Bengali is considered to be a Category II language in terms of difficulty for speakers of English.