More important than any dialect is the phenomenon of diglossia or the coexistence of two styles of the language: sadhu bhasa, formal and literary, and colloquial calit bhasa. It is recognized in the Indian Constitution as one of the 23 official languages of the country. Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh as well as the official language of West Bengal. There are about 265 million Bengali native speakers of which 168 million in Bangladesh (98 % of the total population) and 97 million in India, mainly in the states of West Bengal, Assam, Tripura, Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa: In 1947 the linguistic area of Bengal was split along religious lines: West Bengal with a Hindu majority remained in India while a new state was created with Muslim majority (Eastern Pakistan, that later became Bangladesh).ĭistribution and Speakers. Due to the early and widespread Islamization of the area many words from Arabic and Persian were incorporated into Bengali.
A number of phonological and morphological changes relates Bengali to other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese and Oriya. It emerged from Middle Indo-Aryan at the beginning of the second millennium CE in Bengal, in the northeast of India. Bengali is, after Hindi, the second largest language of South Asia, and the sixth largest of the world. Alternative Name: Bangla, term which tends to replace the established name.Ĭlassification: Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Modern Indo-Aryan, Eastern.
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