বাংলা শিখুন

The script used for Bengali, Assamese, and other languages is known as Bengali script. Almost all the cases of silent letters existing in Bengali are found in the tatsam words.The বাংলাবেট অধিভুক্ত Bengali writing system, therefore, is often not a true guide for pronunciation. That is why most of the tatsam words are pronounced way different from what they are written or spelt. Bengali has lots of tatsam words (words directly derived from Sanskrit) and in all these words, the original spelling has been preserved but the pronunciations have changed due to consonant mergers and sound shifts.

• After the Partition of India in the 20th century, the Pakistani government attempted to institute the Perso-Arabic script as the standard for Bengali in East Pakistan; this was met with resistance and contributed to the Bengali language movement.
• To represent a vowel in isolation from any preceding or following consonant, the independent form of the vowel is used.
• With over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million as second language speakers as of 2025, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world.

Bengali Consonants (ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ – Benjonborno) – 39 Essential Letters

The varieties of Prakrit spoken in Bengal region were generally referred to as “eastern Magadhi Prakrit”, as coined by linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, as the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects were influential in the first millennium when Bengal was a part of the Greater Magadhan realm. It is the second most spoken and fifth fastest growing language in India, following Hindi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, and Meitei (Manipuri), according to the 2011 census of India. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states including Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha and Uttarakhand. Bengali is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language. With over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million as second language speakers as of 2025, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world.

The first version of the Aesop’s Fables in Bengali was printed using Roman letters based on English phonology by the Scottish linguist John Gilchrist. Though the Portuguese standard did not receive much growth, a few Roman Bengali works relating to Christianity and Bengali grammar were printed as far as Lisbon in 1743. In the 16th century, Portuguese missionaries began a tradition of using the Roman alphabet to transcribe the Bengali language. The variant in Sylhet was identical to the Baitali Kaithi script of Hindustani with the exception of Sylhet Nagri possessing matra. In Sylhet and Bankura, modified versions of the Kaithi script had some historical prominence, mainly among Muslim communities.

Romanisation

Court support for Bengali culture and language waned when the Mughal Empire conquered Bengal in the late 16th and early 17th century. During the medieval period, Middle Bengali was characterised by the elision of the word-final অ ô and the spread of compound verbs, which originated from the Sanskrit schwa. For example, Ardhamagadhi is believed to have evolved into Abahatta around the 6th century, which competed with the ancestor of Bengali for some time.better source needed The ancestor of Bengali was the language of the Pala Empire and the Sena dynasty. A research document Classical Bangla published in 2024 by the Kolkata-based institute “Institute of Language Studies and Research” (ILSR), mentions the presence of 51 Bengali words in the dictionary. The Bengali language evolved as a distinct language over the course of time. Magadhi Prakrit was also spoken in modern-day Bihar and Assam, and this vernacular eventually evolved into Ardha Magadhi.

Other dialects, with minor variations from Standard Colloquial, are used in other parts of West Bengal and western Bangladesh, such as the Midnapore dialect, characterised by some unique words and constructions. Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. In the dialects prevalent in much of eastern and south-eastern Bangladesh (Barisal, Chittagong, Dhaka and Sylhet Divisions of Bangladesh), many of the stops and affricates heard in West Bengal and western Bangladesh are pronounced as fricatives. The West-Central dialects (Rarhi or Nadia dialect) form the basis of modern standard colloquial Bengali. Modern Bengali vocabulary is based on words inherited from Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, along with tatsamas and reborrowings from Sanskrit and borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Austroasiatic languages and other languages with which it has historically been in contact. Modern Bengali shows a high degree of diglossia, with the literary and standard form differing greatly from the colloquial speech of the regions that identify with the language.

To emphatically represent a consonant sound without any inherent vowel attached to it, a special diacritic, called the hôsôntô (্), may be added below the basic consonant grapheme (as in ম্ m). The letters run from left to right and spaces are used to separate orthographic words. While most writing is in Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), spoken dialects exhibit a greater variety. For example, the word salt is লবণ lôbôṇ in the east which corresponds to নুন nun in the west. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia and Kushtia District. Similarly, Hajong is considered a separate language, although it shares similarities to Northern Bengali dialects.

When a definite article such as -টা -ṭa (singular) or -গুলো -gulo (plural) is added, as in the tables below, nouns are also inflected for number. Nouns and pronouns are inflected for case, including nominative, objective, genitive (possessive), and locative. Additionally, optional particles (e.g. কি -ki, না -na, etc.) are often encliticised onto the first or last word of a yes–no question. Yes–no questions do not require any change to the basic word order; instead, the low (L) tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling (HL) tone. Bengali nouns are not assigned gender, which leads to minimal changing of adjectives (inflection). The most recent attempt has been by publishers Mitra and Ghosh with the launch of three popular children’s books, Abol Tabol, Hasi Khusi and Sahoj Path, in Roman script at the Kolkata Book Fair 2018.

The phonemic inventory of standard Bengali consists of 29 consonants and 7 vowels, as well as 7 nasalised vowels. Bengali exhibits diglossia, though some scholars have proposed triglossia or even n-glossia or heteroglossia between the written and spoken forms of the language. The standard literary form of Modern Bengali was developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries based on the west-central dialect spoken in Shantipur region of the Nadia district. The local Apabhraṃśa of the eastern subcontinent, Purbi Apabhraṃśa or Abahatta (lit. ’meaningless sounds’), eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three groups, the Bengali–Assamese languages, the Bihari languages, and the Odia language. Bengali consonants form the core of the Bengali writing system. The Bengali alphabet (বাংলা বর্ণমালা) consists of 11 vowels and 39 consonants.