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Bengali (language)

Bengali
Bangla
বাংলা
বাংলা.svg
"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))
Early forms
Abahattha
  • Old Bengali
Dialects
Eastern Nagari script (Bengali alphabet)
Bengali Braille
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
Idioma bengalí.png
Bengali speaking region of South Asia
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Bengali (/bɛŋˈɡɔːli/), also known by its endonym Bangla (/ˈbɑːŋlɑː/; বাংলা [ˈbaŋla] (About this sound 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.


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