Bengali language

Bengali
Bangla
বাংলা
"Bangla" in Bengali script
Pronunciation	[ˈbaŋla] (listen)
Region	Bangladesh and India
Ethnicity	Bengalis
Native speakers	250–300 million (2017) (L1 plus L2 speakers)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit Eastern Zone Bengali-Assamese Bengali
Early forms	Abahattha Old Bengali
Dialects	see Bengali dialects
Writing system	Eastern Nagari script (Bengali alphabet) Bengali Braille
Signed forms	Bengali signed forms
Official status
Official language in	Bangladesh India (in West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley)
Regulated by	Bangla Academy Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi
Language codes
ISO 639-1	bn
ISO 639-2	ben
ISO 639-3	ben
Glottolog	beng1280
Linguasphere	59-AAF-u
Bengali speaking region of South Asia

Bengali is the most eastern Indo-Aryan language from South Asia. It developed from a language called Pali.

Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura.

There are about 220 million native speakers and about 250 million total speakers of Bengali. It is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, ranking seventh.

Almost all of the people in Bangladesh speak Bengali, and many famous books and poems are written in Bengali. Rabindranath Tagore was a famous poet who wrote in Bengali. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written in this language.

Bengali has developed over the course of more than 1,300 years. Bengali literature, with its millennium-old literary history, has extensively developed since the Bengali Renaissance and is one of the most prolific and diverse literary traditions in Asia. The Bengali language movement from 1948 to 1956 demanding Bengali to be an official language of Pakistan fostered Bengali nationalism in East Bengal leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1999, UNESCO recognised 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the language movement. The Bengali language is the quintessential element of Bengali identity and binds together a culturally diverse region.

History

The descent of proto-Gauda, the ancestor of the modern Bengali language, from the proto-Gauda-Kamarupa line of the proto-Magadhan(Magadhi Prakrit).

Ancient

Although Sanskrit was practised by Hindu Brahmins in Bengal since the first millennium BCE, the local Buddhist population were speaking in some varieties of the Prakrita languages. These varieties 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 Magadhan realm. The local varieties had no official status during the Gupta Empire, and with Bengal increasingly becoming a hub of Sanskrit literature for Hindu priests, the vernacular of Bengal gained a lot of influence from Sanskrit. Magadhi Prakrit was also spoken in modern-day Bihar and Assam, and this vernacular eventually evolved into Ardha Magadhi. Ardha Magadhi began to give way to what is known as Apabhraṃśa, by the end of the first millennium. The Bengali language evolved as a distinct language by the course of time.

Early

Though some claim that some 10th-century texts were in Bengali; it is not certain whether they represent a differentiated language or whether they represent a stage when Eastern Indo-Aryan languages were differentiating. The local Apabhraṃśa of the eastern subcontinent, Purbi Apabhraṃśa or Abahatta ("Meaningless Sounds"), eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three groups of the Bengali–Assamese languages, the Bihari languages, and the Odia language. Some argue that the points of divergence occurred much earlier – going back to even 500 CE but the language was not static: different varieties coexisted and authors often wrote in multiple dialects in this period. For example, Ardhamagadhi is believed to have evolved into Abahatta around the 6th century, which competed with the ancestor of Bengali for some time. Proto-Bengali was the language of the Pala Empire and the Sena dynasty.

Medieval

Silver Taka from the Sultanate of Bengal, circa 1417

Silver coin with proto-Bengali script, Harikela Kingdom, circa 9th–13th century

During the medieval period, Middle Bengali was characterised by the elision of word-final অ ô, the spread of compound verbs, and influence from the Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages. The arrival of merchants and traders from the Middle East and Turkestan into the Buddhist-ruling Pala Empire, from as early as the 7th century, gave birth to Islamic influence in the region. Starting with Bakhtiyar Khalji's conquest in the 13th century, the subsequent Muslim expeditions to Bengal greatly encouraged the migratory movements of Arab Muslims and Turco-Persians, who heavily influenced the local vernacular by settling among the native population. Bengali acquired prominence, over Persian, in the court of the Sultans of Bengal with the ascent of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah.<ref>"What is more significant, a contemporary Chinese traveler reported that although Persian was understood by some in the court, the language in universal use there was Bengali. This points to the waning, although certainly not yet the disappearance, of the sort of foreign mentality that the Muslim ruling class in Bengal had exhibited since its arrival over two centuries earlier.