Introduction to Bengali

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit languages. Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, southern Assam- also known as Barak Valley, and part of Tripura. With nearly 230 million total speakers, Bengali is one of the most spoken languages (ranking fifth or sixth) in the world. Bengali is the primary language spoken in Bangladesh and is the second most spoken language in India. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-Iranian languages and the most eastern of the Indo-European languages.

Bengali is the national and official language of Bangladesh and one of the 23 official languages recognised by the Republic of India. It is the official language of the states of West Bengal and Tripura. It is also a major language in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It was made an official language of Sierra Leone in order to honour the Bangladeshi peacekeeping force from the United Nations stationed there. It is also the co-official language of Assam, which has three predominantly Sylheti-speaking districts of southern Assam: Cachar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi.The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written by the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore.

Bengali nouns are not assigned gender, which leads to minimal changing of adjectives (inflection). However, nouns and pronouns are highly declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated. As a consequence, unlike Hindi, Bengali verbs do not change form depending on the gender of the nouns.

As a Head-Final language, Bengali follows Subject Object Verb word order, although variations to this theme are common. Bengali makes use of postpositions, as opposed to the prepositions used in English and other European languages. Determiners follow the noun, while numerals, adjectives, and possessors precede the noun.

The Bengali writing system is not a purely alphabetic script such as the Latin script. Rather, it is an abugida called the Bengali script, which is a variant of the Eastern Nagari script used throughout Bangladesh and eastern India (Assam, West Bengal and the Mithila region of Bihar). The Eastern Nagari script is believed to have evolved from a modified Brahmic script around 1000 CE and is similar to the Devanagari abugida used for Sanskrit and many modern Indic languages such as Hindi. The Bengali script has particularly close historical relationships with the Assamese script, the Oriya script (although this relationship is not strongly evident in appearance) and Mithilakshar (the native script for Maithili language).

The Bengali script is a cursive script with eleven graphemes or signs denoting the independent form of nine vowels and two diphthongs, and thirty-nine signs denoting the consonants with the so called "inherent" vowels. The concept of capitalization is absent in Bengali orthography or spelling system. There is no variation in initial, medial and final forms of letters as in the Arabic script. The letters run from left to right on a horizontal line, and spaces are used to separate orthographic words.