Most Popular Outspoken English Daily in Bangladesh

Sanskrit distinguishes between a consonant ব (b) and a semi-vowel ভ (v). If the basic ড (d) of Sanskrit falls within or at the end of a Bangla word, the sound is pronounced ড় BanglaBet casino (d). However, as in the case of many languages of the Indo-Aryan family, অ (a) at the end of syllables in Bangla often disappears. As in Sanskrit, every independent consonant syllable has the inherent vowel অ (a), unless another vowel is specified.

The Bengali alphabet has often been included with the group of Brahmic scripts for romanisation where the true phonetic value of Bengali is never represented. 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. So when these Sanskrit words re-entered the Bengali vocabulary as tatsam words, their pronunciations were modified, but their spellings were retained. By the 19th century, the Bengali phonology had diverged a lot from Sanskrit phonology and had lost many of the consonant clusters used in Sanskrit.

Grammar

The productive vocabulary used in modern literary works, is made up mostly (67 percent) of tôdbhôbo words, while tôtshômo only make up 25 percent of the total. A large proportion of these 100,000 words are archaic or highly technical, minimizing their actual usage. Bengali has as many as 100,000 separate words, of which 50,000 (67 percent) are considered tôtshômo (direct reborrowings from Sanskrit), 21,100 (28 percent) are tôdbhôbo (derived from Sanskrit words), and the rest are bideshi (foreign) and deshi words. Non-finite verbs have no inflection for tense or person, while finite verbs are fully inflected for person (first, second, third), tense (present, past, future), aspect (simple, perfect, progressive), and honor (intimate, familiar, and formal), but not for number. However, when the semantic class of the noun is understood from the measure word, the noun is often omitted and only the measure word is used, e.g. শুধু একজন থাকবে। Shudhu êk-jon thakbe. Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words (e.g. আট বিড়াল aţ biŗal instead of আটটা বিড়াল aţ-ţa biŗal “eight cats”) would typically be considered ungrammatical.

• It is a cursive script with eleven graphemes or signs denoting nine vowels and two diphthongs, and thirty-nine graphemes representing consonants and other modifiers.
• In the 19th century it became standardized as the literary language and also as the appropriate vehicle for business and personal exchanges.
• Although Bengali speakers were more numerous in the population of Pakistan, Urdu was legislated as the sole national language.

Languages written with the Eastern Nagari (Bengali) alphabet

In sentences involving focused words and/or phrases, the rising tones only last until the focused word; all following words carry a low tone. In a simple declarative sentence, most words and/or phrases in Bengali carry a rising tone, with the exception of the last word in the sentence, which only carries a low tone. For Bengali words, intonation or pitch of voice has minor significance, apart from a few isolated cases. In any case, word-stress does not alter the meaning of a word and is always subsidiary to sentence-stress. For example, while the word shob-bho “civilized” carries the primary stress on the first syllable shob, adding the negative prefix ô- creates ô-shob-bho “uncivilized,” where the primary stress is now on the newly-added first syllable অ ô.

Spelling-to-pronunciation Inconsistencies

Romani grammar is also closer to Bengali grammar than to that of western Indo-Aryan languages. The script is known as the Bengali alphabet for Bengali and its dialects and the Assamese alphabet for Assamese language with some minor variations. The script used for Bengali, Assamese, and other languages is known as Bengali script. That is why most of the tatsam words are pronounced way different from what they are written or spelt.

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 in the world, and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers. Bengali,a also known by its endonym Bangla,b is a classical Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Bengali people, native to the Bengal region in South Asia, spread across Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, and parts of the Barak Valley of southern Assam.

Western alveolo-palatal affricates চ tʃɔ, ছ tʃʰɔ~tʃɔ, জ dʒɔ correspond to eastern চ tsɔ~sɔ, ছ sɔ, জ dzɔ~zɔ. 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.