Concept

Bengali language

Overview

Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla, is a classical Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Bengali people, native to the Bengal region (Bangladesh, India's West Bengal) as well as in Barak Valley in Assam and Tripura in South Asia. 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.

Bengali is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language. It is the second-most widely spoken language in India. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. It is also the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay 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 also spoken by the Bengali diasporas (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) across Europe, North America, the Middle East and other regions.

Bengali was accorded the status of a classical language by the Government of India on 3 October 2024. 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.

Bengali has developed over more than 1,400 years. Bengali literature, with its millennium-old literary history, was extensively developed during 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 that Bengali 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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Bengali language is.
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This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Bengali language is.
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So they have enriched what was at one time looked upon as a mere jargon--but what the Jewish children learnt from their mothers--by taking special pains to translate into it the best thought of the world. This is a truly marvellous work. It has been done during the present generation, and Webster's Dictionary defines it as a polyglot jargon used for inter-communication by Jews from different nations.
Mahatma Gandhi, Third class in Indian railways
Close in meaning to Bengali language; the term itself is not named.
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Bengali language

Overview

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Philosophers who discussed Bengali language

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