বাংলা শিখুন
After close contact with several indigenous Austroasiatic languages, and later the Delhi Sultanate, the Bengal Sultanate, and the Mughal Empire, whose court language was Persian, numerous Arabic, Persian, and Chaghatai words were absorbed into the lexicon. Because of centuries of contact with Europeans, Turkic peoples, and Persians, Bengali has absorbed numerous words from foreign languages, often totally integrating these borrowings into the core vocabulary. About 45% per cent of Bengali words are unmodified Sanskrit, and the remaining words are from foreign languages. In this sense, all nouns in Bengali, unlike most other Indo-European languages, are similar to mass nouns. An appropriate measure word (MW), a classifier, must be used between the numeral and the noun (most languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area are similar in this respect).
The same হ্য is pronounced as ‘hæ’ as in হ্যাঁ (meaning “yes”) (written as hyām̐ but pronounced as nasalised “hæ”). For example, ‘হ্য’ as in ঐতিহ্য (meaning “heritage”) where hy is pronounced as jjh (written as aitihya but pronounced as ōitijjhō). Examples are লক্ষ্মণ (written as lakṣmaṇa but pronounced as lokkhōn “Lakshman”), বিশ্বাস (written as biśbāsa but pronounced as biśśaś “belief”), বাধ্য (written as bādhya but pronounced as baddhō “obliged”) and স্বাস্থ্য (written as sbāsthya but pronounced as śasthō “health”). Many consonant clusters have different sounds than their constituent consonants. Another kind of inconsistency is concerned with the incomplete coverage of phonological information in the script. The letter ষ also, sometimes, retains the voiceless retroflex sibilant ʂ sound when used in certain consonant conjuncts as in কষ্ট kɔʂʈo “suffering”, গোষ্ঠী ɡoʂʈʰi “clan”, etc.
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Two of these, /oi̯/ and /ou̯/, are the only ones with representation in script, as ঐ and ঔ respectively. Bengali is known for its wide variety of diphthongs, combinations of vowels occurring within the same syllable. The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one variety – often, speakers are fluent in Cholitobhasha (SCB) and one or more regional dialects. Some dialects, particularly those of the Chittagong region, bear only a superficial resemblance to SCB. However, a majority in Bangladesh speaks dialects notably different from SCB. There are cases where speakers of Standard Bengali in West Bengal will use a different word from a speaker of Standard Bengali in Bangladesh, even though both words are of native Bengali descent.
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 https://banglabet-bd.com/login 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.
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Bengali was accorded the status of a classical language by the Government of India on 3 October 2024. Bengali is also spoken by the Bengali diasporas (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) across Europe, North America, the Middle East and other regions. It is also the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam.
- 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.
- Begin your Bengali journey with these fundamental words and phrases.
- Practice writing and pronouncing each consonant for fluency.
- 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.
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.
There is yet to be a uniform standard collating sequence (sorting order of graphemes to be used in dictionaries, indices, computer sorting programs, etc.) of Bengali graphemes. The letter-forms also employ the concepts of letter-width and letter-height (the vertical space between the visible matra and an invisible baseline). For example, in মই moj “ladder” and in ইলিশ iliʃ “Hilsa fish”, the independent form of the vowel ই is used (cf. the dependent formি). In these consonant-vowel ligatures, the so-called “inherent” vowel ɔ is first expunged from the consonant before adding the vowel, but this intermediate expulsion of the inherent vowel is not indicated in any visual manner on the basic consonant sign ম mɔ.
Bengali has minimal gender distinctions compared to other Indo-Aryan languages. Bengali vowels are the building blocks of pronunciation. Our interactive guide helps you master each letter with proper pronunciation. The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three types of contact. Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words (e.g. আট বিড়াল aṭ biṛal instead of আটটা বিড়াল aṭ-ṭa biṛal “eight cats”) would typically be considered ungrammatical.
