Bengali

Bengali, the national language of Bangladesh (Bangla), and the third most widely spoken language of India, being the principal language of West Bengal State, where it is known as Bengali. There are small differences in the language as spoken in Bangladesh compared with India, mainly associated with a greater influence of Arabic in the predominantly Muslim country of Bangladesh. The 1991 census of India gave a figure of 69,595,738 speakers, while more recent sources put this figure at around 70.5 million; in Bangladesh it has over 100 million first-language speakers, 98 per cent of the population. Bangla/Bengali is thus one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with 211 million speakers including second-language speakers.

The modern written and spoken language in both countries is based on a standard that developed around Kolkata. Nevertheless, the language has a very wide range of dialects.

Like Hindi, Bangla is a descendant of Sanskrit, and with Assamese and Oriya, is one of the Eastern group of Indo-Aryan languages. It uses the Bangla alphabet derived from Sanskrit (from the Brahmi script); its existence as a distinct language can be traced to about the 11th century. It has a well-established literary tradition; its most famous writer is the distinguished Nobel Prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Bangla developed, like Hindi, Gujarati, and numerous other Indian languages, out of the Middle Indic Prakrits, the regional vernaculars that the Indo-Aryan peoples used from about the 3rd century bc to the 10th century ad, the most prominent among which was Pali, the language of the sacred Buddhist scriptures.

The spread of Islam to Bengal brought with it a large Arabic and Persian vocabulary, but in other respects the language is typically Indo-Aryan. Unlike its ancestors, however, Bangla has lost the system of grammatical gender. Modern Bangla can, like its closest relatives, draw on a reservoir of Sanskrit-based terminology to expand and enrich its literary and technical vocabulary.

On February 21, 1952, protestors died when police fired on a rally asking for Bangla (at the time the mother tongue of more than half in East Bengal) to be one of the state languages of East Bengal (then in Pakistan). This day is still marked by many as Language Martyrs day and the rally highlighted the cause of the Language Movement, begun in 1947 and ending in 1956 with the adoption of Bangla as a state language in Pakistan.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.