Bengali (language)

Bengali
Bangla
বাংলা
"Bangla" in Bengali script
Pronunciation	English pronunciation: /bɛŋˈɡɔːli/ Bengali pronunciation: [ˈbaŋla]
Region	Bangladesh, India
Ethnicity	Bengalis
Native speakers	268 million In Bangladesh: 155,932,659 In India: 93,369,796 (2011) 19.2 million L2 speakers (in Bangladesh (2011 census))
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Magadhi Prakrit Eastern Zone (Magadhan) Bengali-Assamese Bengali
Early forms	Abahattha Old Bengali
Dialects	see Bengali dialects
Writing system	Eastern Nagari script (Bengali alphabet) Bengali Braille
Signed forms	Bengali signed forms
Official status
Official language in	Bangladesh  India (in West Bengal, Tripura, Jharkhand and Assam)
Regulated by	Bangla Academy Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi
Language codes
ISO 639-1	bn
ISO 639-2	ben
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	beng1280
Linguasphere	59-AAF-u
Bengali speaking region of South Asia
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Bengali (/bɛŋˈɡɔːli/), also known by its endonym Bangla (/ˈbɑːŋlɑː/; বাংলা [ˈbaŋla] ( listen)), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the Indian Subcontinent. It is the national and official language of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, and the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura, Assam (Barak Valley) and Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Republic of India, and is thus one of the two non-Hindi languages (the other being Telugu) that is the primary state official language of more than one state. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of India. With 205 million speakers, Bengali is the seventh most spoken native language in the world by population. Dictionaries from the early 20th century attributed slightly more than half of the Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e., naturally modified Sanskrit words, corrupted forms of Sanskrit words, and loanwords from non-Indo-European languages), about 30 percent to unmodified Sanskrit words, and the remainder to foreign words. Dominant in the last group was Persian, which was also the source of some grammatical forms. More recent studies suggest that the use of native and foreign words has been increasing, mainly because of the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style. Today, Bengali is the primary language spoken in Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken language in India.