Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh and several states in India. With over 270 million speakers, it is commonly ranked as one of the top five languages in terms of the number of native speakers. Bengali is also sometimes referred to as Bangla.
The Bengali language is a member of the Eastern Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of several languages descended from the ancient Sanskrit language.
Bengali is written in a syllabic alphabet that is very different from the English alphabet. It is, however, similar to the Devanagari alphabet used by Hindi. In the Bengali alphabet, all consonants have an inherent vowel sound. Special diacritic marks can be used to change the default vowel sound. In addition to the consonant characters and diacritics, there are also separate characters that can be used to write the vowels independently and a large assortment of special characters that can be used to write various consonant clusters.
There are no uppercase or lowercase forms for Bengali letters. The Bengali language is written from left to right, like English. Another notable aspect of Bengali letters is that they all have at least a partial bar at the top, which connects to the other letters in a word. Three Bengali letters are shown below as examples.
Many words in Bengali vocabulary are derived from Sanskrit. Others have been borrowed from foreign languages, such as Assamese, Chinese, and Burmese. In the Bengali-speaking parts of India, where the primary religion is Hinduism, local dialects have absorbed many words from Hindi. In predominantly Muslim Bangladesh, borrowings from Arabic are more common. Recent contributions have also come from European languages, including French, Portuguese, and English.
Bengali nouns do not have gender, but they are inflected for case, meaning they change form depending on their role in the sentence. Pronouns are inflected as well. Adjectives come before nouns, as do numbers. However, an appropriate measure-word must always be used between the number and the noun. Bengali verbs are heavily inflected to indicate person and tense. Verbs also have formal and informal forms. The basic word order for Bengali sentences is Subject-Object-Verb.
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