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Regional varieties in spoken Bengali constitute a dialect continuum. In 2009, elected representatives in both Bangladesh and West Bengal called for Bengali to be made an official language of the United Nations. Furthermore, it is believed by many that the national anthem of Sri Lanka (Sri Lanka Matha) was inspired by a Bengali poem written by Rabindranath Tagore, while some even believe the anthem was originally written in Bengali and then translated into Sinhala. Additionally, the first two verses of Vande Mataram, a patriotic song written in Bengali by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, was adopted as the “national song” of India in both the colonial period and later in 1950 in independent India.

Essential Bengali Words & Phrases – Start Speaking Today

The phonemic inventory of standard Bengali consists of 29 consonants and 7 vowels, as well as 7 nasalised vowels. Bengali exhibits diglossia, though some scholars have proposed triglossia or even n-glossia or heteroglossia between the written and spoken forms of the language. The standard literary form of Modern Bengali was developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries based on the west-central dialect spoken in Shantipur region of the Nadia district.

Notuner Gaan known as “Chol Chol Chol” is Bangladesh’s national march, written by The National Poet Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bengali in 1928. The national anthems of both Bangladesh (Amar Sonar Bangla) and India (Jana Gana Mana) were written in Bengali by the Bengali Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Bengali has been a second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and in Barak Valley of Assam.

Bengali Consonants (ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ – Benjonborno) – 39 Essential Letters

• So when these Sanskrit words re-entered the Bengali vocabulary as tatsam words, their pronunciations were modified, but their spellings were retained.
• What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia and Kushtia District.
• However, nouns and pronouns are moderately declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated, and the verbs do not change form depending on the number of the noun.
• Thus, same letters and graphemes can often have different pronunciations depending on their position in a word and different graphemes and letters often have the same pronunciation.

The letters run from left to right and spaces are used to separate orthographic words. While most writing is in Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), spoken dialects exhibit a greater variety. For example, the word salt is লবণ lôbôṇ in the east which corresponds to নুন nun in the west. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia and Kushtia District.

The varieties of Prakrit spoken in Bengal region were generally referred to as “eastern Magadhi Prakrit”, as coined by linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji, as the Middle Indo-Aryan dialects were influential in the first millennium when Bengal was a part of the Greater Magadhan realm. It is the second most spoken and fifth fastest growing language in India, following Hindi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, and Meitei (Manipuri), according to the 2011 census of India. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states including Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha and Uttarakhand. Bengali is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language. With over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million as second language speakers as of 2025, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world.

Question Formation

The script used for Bengali, Assamese, and other languages is known as Bengali script. Almost all the cases of silent letters existing in Bengali are found in the tatsam words.The Bengali writing system, therefore, is often not a true guide for pronunciation. That is why most of the tatsam words are pronounced way different from what they are written or spelt. Bengali has lots of tatsam words (words directly derived from Sanskrit) and in all these words, the original spelling has been preserved but the pronunciations have changed due to consonant mergers and sound shifts. The main reason for these numerous inconsistencies is that there have been lots of sound mergers in Bengali, but the script has failed to account for the sound shifts and consonant mergers in the language. Thus, same letters and graphemes can often have different pronunciations depending on their position in a word and different graphemes and letters often have the same pronunciation.

The Bengali consonant clusters (যুক্তব্যঞ্জন juktôbênjôn) are usually realised as ligatures, where the consonant which comes first is put on top of or to the left of the one that immediately follows. In addition to the inherent-vowel-suppressing hôsôntô, three more diacritics are banglabet-bd.com/bd/login/ commonly used in Bengali. The abugida nature of Bengali consonant graphemes is not consistent, however. This diacritic, however, is not common and is chiefly employed as a guide to pronunciation.

A consonant sound followed by some vowel sound other than the inherent ɔ is orthographically realised by using a variety of vowel allographs above, below, before, after, or around the consonant sign, thus forming the ubiquitous consonant-vowel typographic ligatures. Since the Bengali script is an abugida, its consonant graphemes usually do not represent phonetic segments, but carry an “inherent” vowel and thus are syllabic in nature. Native Bengali words do not allow initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC (i.e., one vowel flanked by a consonant on each side). Other dialects, with minor variations from Standard Colloquial, are used in other parts of West Bengal and western Bangladesh, such as the Midnapore dialect, characterised by some unique words and constructions.