Bengali is an eastern Indo-Aryan language. It is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh, the Indian state of West Bengal, and parts of the Indian states of Tripura and Assam. It is written using the Bengali script. With about 220 million native and about 250 million total speakers, Bengali is one of the most spoken languages, ranked seventh in the world. The national song of India, the national anthem of India, and the national anthem of Bangladesh were composed in the Bengali language.
HSC Bangla 1st Paper Note
Along with other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali evolved circa 1000–1200 CE from eastern Middle Indo-Aryan dialects such as the Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, which developed from a dialect or group of dialects that were close, but not identical to, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit. Literary Bengali saw borrowings from Classical Sanskrit, preserving spelling while adapting pronunciation to that of Bengali, during the period of Middle Bengali and the Bengali Renaissance. The modern literary form of Bengali was developed during the 19th and nearly 20th centuries based on the dialect spoken in the Nadia region, a west-central Bengali dialect.
Bengali presents a strong case of diglossia, with the literary and standard form differing greatly from the colloquial speech of the regions that identify with the language.[8] Standard Bengali in West Bengal and Bangladesh are marked by some differences in usage, accent, and phonetics. Today, literary form and dialects of Bengali constitute the primary language spoken in Bangladesh and the second most commonly spoken language in India. Also with a rich literary tradition arising from the Bengali Renaissance, Bengali language binds together a culturally diverse region and is an important contributor to Bengali nationalism.
The Bengali Language Movement was a popular ethnolinguistic movement in the former East Bengal (today Bangladesh), which was a result of the strong linguistic consciousness of the Bengali people to gain and protect spoken and written Bengali script’s recognition as a state language of the then Dominion of Pakistan. On the day of 21 February 1952, several students and political activists were killed during protests near Dhaka University campus.
The day has since been observed as Language Movement Day in Bangladesh and was proclaimed the International Mother Language Day by UNESCO on 17 November 1999 marking the Bengali language the only language in the world to be also known for its language movements and people sacrificing their lives for their mother language Bengali. There was a similar Bengali language movement in Assam which was a protest against the decision of the Government of Assam to make Assamese the only official language of the state even though a significant proportion of the population were Bengali speaking.
Bengali also was known by its endonym Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Bengalis in South Asia. It is the official and most widely spoken the language of Bangladesh and second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India, behind Hindi. In 2015, 160 million speakers were reported for Bangladesh, and the 2011 Indian census counted another 100 million.
The official and de facto national language of Bangladesh is Modern Standard Bengali (Literary Bengali). It serves as the lingua franca of the nation, with 98% of Bangladeshis being fluent in Bengali (including dialects) as their first language. Within India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley in the state of Assam.
It is also spoken in different parts of the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. It is also the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal and is spoken by significant minorities in other states including Jharkhand, Bihar, Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Odisha. With approximately 250–300 million total speakers worldwide, Bengali is usually counted as the sixth most spoken native language in the world by population.
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