Technical sheet

Name of the language in Bengali : বাংলা

Spoken in: Bangladesh

by around 100.000.000 people

Particular features: Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language of East South Asia, evolved from Sanskrit and Prakrit. The traditional English rendering is "Bengali", but increasingly, the rendering "Bangla" is gaining currency in English. It is one of the most widely spoken languages of the world and the second most commonly spoken language in India. It is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-European languages, and is closely related to Assamese, Oriya and Maithili (particularly their dialects). The language uses the Bengala alphabet (a.k.a. syllabic or abugida), a script deriving from the Brahamin family, similar to Devanagari, and also used for Hindi, Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages. There are 12 vowel signs and 52 consonant signs (each Bengala consonant has a closed sound, and is written with an external diacritic beneath it). An unusual fact: the Bengala script is based on a more ancient version of the language, and therefore does not include certain subsequent sound fusions. For example, the alphabet has two letters for the sound [dʒ] and three for the sound [ʃ]. Conversely, certain letters may currently be pronounced in two ways: the letter এ may represent the low vowel sound [æ] or the medium-high vowel sound [e]. Furthermore, many letters and diacritics have become "silent" in the spoken language. The word for "health", for example, is pronounced [shastho], but is written [swaysthyo]. Given these inconsistencies and redundancies, the Bengala script may not be described as being entirely phonetic. The same script, with just a few changes, is also used to write in Assamese.

Code ISO639-1: bn

encoding: x-iscii-be, utf-8

script: Bengali

Main search engines:
http://www.google.com/intl/bn
http://dmoz.org/World/Bangla