Bengali language: features

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 widely spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic and Portuguese.

Where do they speak Bengali?

• Bangladesh Bengali is the national language of the state of Bangladesh. Here, the Bengali language is native to 106 million people, and another 20 million people in this country also speak it.
• India. Bengali is one of the 23 official dialects 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 Goalpara.

In addition to the above countries, Bengali is spoken in Nepal and Pakistan. Bengali speakers are also found in the Middle East, Europe, the USA and Canada.

Dialects

Spoken Bengali can be described as a combination of different dialects, some of which are completely different from each other. The standard form of Bengali, adopted in Bangladesh and West Bengal, is based on the west-central dialect spoken by educated residents of Calcutta back in the 19th century. Often people who speak Bengali know and use both the generally accepted colloquial form and the dialect of their region.

In addition, two styles coexist side-by-side in Bengali: conservative high-literary, largely borrowed from Sanskrit, as well as informal everyday language.

Grammar

A simple sentence in Bengali usually has the following structure: subject-object-verb. In the present tense, a negative particle is placed at the end of a sentence. The link or verb connecting the subject and the predicate is often omitted. There are 10 tenses of verbs (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 in six forms, because there are formal and informal forms of circulation), there is no grammatical gender. Adjectives, as a rule, do not change according to number or case.

Writing

Bengali writing originates in Brahmi, one of the two types of Old Indian writing, and especially from its eastern variety. Bengali writing followed a different line of development, unlike the Devanagari and Oriya scripts, however, the nature of the Bengali and Assamese scripts basically coincides. By the 12th century AD, the Bengal alphabet was already practically formed, although some natural changes continued until the 16th century, and several amendments were specially made in the 19th century.

Bengali is spelled from left to right. 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, right up to the beginning of the 21st century. For example, the Bangla Academy in Dhaka is guided by written reforms in 1936, while the Bangla Academy in West Bengal has proposed a number of its own changes. Vishwa-Bharati University, founded by Bengali poet and Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, also uses several of its own spellings. Finally, some newspapers and publications also use their own corporate identity. It is not surprising that such actions on the part of various organizations created some confusion.

Vocabulary

Bengali vocabulary is a mixture of native Bengali words and borrowings from Sanskrit and other neighboring languages ​​such as Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Burmese and some native Austro-Asian languages ​​of the state of Bangladesh. The history of invasions from Persia and the Middle East has led to multiple borrowings from Turkish, Arab and Persian. And the European colonization brought into the language borrowings from English, Portuguese, French and Dutch.

The above are a few words that will help you maintain a simple dialogue in Bengali.