Thee are no gender distinctions, but Bengali nouns have the following characteristics: Postpositions require that the noun take a certain case. Bengali typically uses postpositions, rather than prepositions. The position of stress alone does not affect word meaning.īengali is an inflected language, i.e., it uses prefixes and suffixes to mark grammatical relations and to form words. Stress in standard Bengali normally falls on the initial syllable of a word. In addition to Bangladesh and India, Bengali is spoken in Nepal, Pakistan, the Middle East, Europe, the U.S., and Canada. It is a s tatutory provincial language in West Bengal, Tripura, and Assam. It is spoken in West Bengal Tripura Jharkhand, Dhanbad, Manbhum, Singhbhum, and Santal Parganas Odisha, Mayar and Bales Bihar Assam, and Goalpara district (Ethnologue). In India, it statutory provincial language in West Bengal, Tripura, Assam states.īengali is one of the 23 official languages of India, where it is spoken by 82.5 million people and the second most-spoken language after Hindi– Urdu. The total number of speakers of Bengali worldwide is 189 million ( Ethnologue), making it the seventh most spoken language in the world after Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, and Portuguese (Ethnologue).īengali is the national language of Bangladesh where it is spoken as a first language by 106 million, and as a second language by 20 million speakers. The direct ancestors of Bengali are Prakrit, and Sanskrit. In Bengali, the language is called Bangla ( bangla means ‘low’). In English, Bengali refers to both the language and the people who speak it. Along with Assamese, it is the easternmost of all Indo-European languages.

Bengali, also called Bangala, Bangla, Bangla-Bhasa, belongs to the Eastern group of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family.

Bengali consonants