Bengali language

Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা Template:IAST) is an Indo-Aryan language of South Asia that evolved as a successor to Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit. Bengali is the English word for the name of the language and for its speakers; in Bengali, the language itself is called Bangla (pronounced: Template:IPA2), a term that now has greater currency in English. From this point forward, Bangla will be used to refer to the language.

With more than 200 million native speakers, it is the fourth or fifth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu). It is also the fourth most spoken language in terms of native speakers [1]. Bangla is the second most commonly spoken language in India (after Hindi). Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-European languages.

As a result of the Bengal renaissance in the 19th and 20th centuries, much of India's most famous literature, poetry, and lyrics are in Bangla; the works of Rabindranath Tagore (the first Asian to be awarded a Nobel Prize), for example, are in Bangla. Many of the reformist religious, philosophical, and political movements that began in that era were led by Bengalis.

Classification and related languages

Bangla is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European language family.

Assamese, Oriya, and Maithili, three other languages belonging to the Maghadan Branch of the Indo-Aryan language family, are very closely related to Bangla. Assamese, Oriya, and Bangla are considered by some to be nearly mutually intelligible; some local dialects of one language bear a striking resemblance to one or more dialects of the other two languages.

Sylheti, Chittagonian, and Chakma are some of the many languages that are often considered dialects of Bangla. Although these languages are mutually intelligible with neighboring dialects of Bangla, they would not be understood by a native speaker of Standard Bangla.

Geographical distribution

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Bangla is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. More than 98% of the total population of Bangladesh speak Bangla as a native language. It is the official language in Bangladesh and one of the official languages in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. There are significant Bangla-speaking communities in the Indian states of Assam and Tripura and in immigrant populations in the West and the Middle East. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are written in Bangla.

Official status

Bangla is the national and official language of Bangladesh and one of the 14 regional languages recognized by the Union of India. It is the official language of the state of West Bengal and the co-official language of the state of Tripura and union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It is also the official language of the three predominantly Sylheti-speaking districts of southern Assam: Silchar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi.

Spoken and literary variants

Like many languages of South Asia, Bangla exhibits a strong case of diglossia between the formal, written language and the vernacular, spoken language. The two standard written forms of Bangla, Shadhubhasha and Choltibhasha, stand in sharp contrast with the spoken forms of Bangla, often referred to as Ancholik Bangla ("Regional Bangla").

Shadhubhasha (literally, "language of sages") adheres to an archaic form of Medieval Bangla and to a heavily Sanskrit-like vocabulary. Songs like the Indian national anthem Jôno Gôno Môno (by Rabindranath Tagore) and the national song of India Bônde Matôrom (by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (Chatterjee)) were actually composed in highly refined Shadhubhasha. However, Shadhubhasha is not spoken in commonplace settings and confined to literary and formal contexts.

Choltibhasha (literally, "the current or running language") comprises the standard pronunciation of Bangla and thus serves as the basis for the orthography of most Bangla writing today. It is modeled on the form of the dialect spoken in the Shantipur region in Nadia district, West Bengal <ref name="morshed"> Morshed, Abul Kalam Manjoor, Article on Bangla dialects, Banglapedia</ref> and districts bordering on the lower reaches of the Hooghly River. However, a variety of regional dialects is to be found.

Dialects

While the standard form of Bangla does not show much variation across the Bengali-speaking areas of South Asia, the regional variants of Bangla are vastly dissimilar from one another. Spoken Bangla stretches across what is called a dialect continuum, where neighboring dialects tend to be very similar, while speakers of dialects from opposite ends of the continuum would not be able to understand one another.

Bangla is typically divided into eight major dialect groups: Western, Southwestern, West-Central, Northern, Bahe, Eastern, Ganda, and Vanga.

Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bangla dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. Similarly, Rajbangshi and Hajong are considered separate languages, although they are very similar to Northern Bangla dialects. Sylheti, closely related to Eastern Bangla, is often considered a separate language. Chittagonian and Chakma are heavily influenced by the neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages, and are also typically considered separate languages from Bangla.

During standardization of Bangla in the late 19th and early 20th century, the cultural elite were mostly from West Bengal, especially Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). To this day, the accepted standard language in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of the 19th century Kolkata elite. This has helped create a state of diglossia in most of Bangladesh, with many speakers familiar with or fluent in both the regional dialect of their community and the standard West-Central dialect used in the media.

Writing system

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Bangla is written in the Bangla alphasyllabary (also called syllabic alphabet or abugida), a Brahmic script similar to the Devanagari alphasyllabary used for Hindi, Sanskrit, and many other Indic languages. The Bangla alphasyllabary is a cursive script with 12 vowel characters and 52 consonant characters. As in all alphasyllabaries, every consonant in the Bangla script can come with what is called an "embedded" or "inherent" vowel sound. For example, the simple letter ম can represent the consonant [m] in a word like কম [kɔm] "less". However, in another word, the same letter ম can represent the sequences [mɔ] or [mo], as in মত [mɔt̪] "opinion" and মন [mon] "mind", respectively, with no added symbol for the vowels [ɔ] or [o]. If the consonant sound is followed by some other vowel sound in the pronunciation, this can be written by writing a variety of vowel diacritics above, below, before, after, or around the consonant they belong to. Vowels not associated with a consonant (for example, vowels at the beginning of a word) are written with separate symbols. To emphatically indicate that a consonant is not pronounced with the embedded vowel, an extra diacritic may be added below the consonant. Consonant clusters are typically indicated by ligating two or more consonant symbols.

The Bangla spelling system is based on a much older version of the language, and thus does not take into acount some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language. For example, the alphabet has two letters for the sound [dʒ] and three for the sound [ʃ]. Conversely, a number of letters now have more than one pronunciation; the letter এ can represent either the low vowel [æ] or the high-mid vowel [e]. Furthermore, many letters and diacritics have become "silent letters" in the spoken language. The word for "health", for example, is written 'swasthyô', but pronounced [ʃast̪ʰo]. With these minor inconsistencies and redundancies, the Bangla script cannot be described as entirely phonemic.

This same script, with a few small modifications, is also used for writing Assamese. Other related languages in the region also make use of the Bangla alphabet. Meithei (Manipuri), a Sino-Tibetan language used in the Indian state of Manipur, was written in the Bangla alphasyllabary for centuries, until the 1980s, when Meetei Mayek (the Meithei alphasyllabary) returned to daily usage. For centuries, the Sylheti language used a different script, based on the Devanagari alphasyllabary. This script, called Sylheti Nagori, has now fallen out of use, as most speakers of Sylheti have adopted the Bangla script.

Sounds

The phonemic inventory of Bangla consists of 29 consonants and 14 vowels, including the seven nasalized vowels. An approximate phonetic scheme is set out below in IPA.

Transliteration

For the purposes of consistent transliteration, the following Romanization scheme is used throughout this article along with other Wikipedia articles related to the Bengali language. The tables below correspond to the IPA transcriptions used above.

Diphthongs

Magadhan languages such as Bangla are known for their wide variety of diphthongs, or combinations of vowels occurring within the same syllable.<ref>Template:Harv</ref> Several vowel combinations can be considered true monosyllabic diphthongs, made up of the main vowel (the nucleus) and the trailing vowel (the off-glide). Almost other vowel combinations are possible, but only across two adjacent syllables, such as the disyllabic vowel combination [u.a] in kua "well".

Stress

Bangla words are virtually all trochaic; the primary stress falls on the initial syllable of the word, while secondary stress often falls on all odd-numbered syllables thereafter, giving strings such as [shô-ho-jo-gi-ta] "cooperation", where the boldface represents primary and secondary stress. The first syllable carries the greatest stress, with the third carrying a somewhat weaker stress, and all following odd-numbered syllables carrying very weak stress.

Adding prefixes to a word typically shifts the stress to the left; 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 [ô].

Intonation

In a simple declarative sentence, most words and/or phrases in Bangla carry a rising tone, with the exception of the last word in the sentence, which only carries a low tone. This intonational pattern creates a musical tone to the typical Bangla sentence, with low and high tones alternating until the final drop in pitch to mark the end of the sentence.

In sentences involving focused words and/or phrases, the rising tones only last until the focused word; all following words carry a low tone. This intonation pattern extends to wh-questions, as wh-words are normally considered to be focused. In yes-no questions, the rising tones may be more exaggerated, and most importantly, the final syllable of the final word in the sentence takes a high falling tone instead of a flat low tone.

Vowel length

Vowel length is not contrastive in Bangla; all else equal, there is no meaningful distinction between a "short vowel" and a "long vowel", unlike the situation in many other Indic languages. However, when morpheme boundaries come into play, vowel length can sometimes distinguish otherwise homophonous words. This is due to the fact that open monosyllables (i.e. words that are made up of only one syllable, with that syllable ending in the main vowel and not a consonant) have somewhat longer vowels than other syllable types. For example, the vowel in cha: "tea" is somewhat longer than the first vowel in chaţa "licking", as cha: is a word with only one syllable, and no final consonant. (The long vowel is marked with a colon : in these examples.) The suffix ţa "the" can be added to cha: to form cha:ţa "the tea". Even when another morpheme is attached to cha:, the long vowel is preserved. Knowing this fact, some interesting cases of apparent vowel length distinction can be found.

Furthermore, using a form of reduplication called "echo reduplication", the long vowel in cha: can be copied into the reduplicant ţa:, giving cha:ţa: "tea and all that comes with it". Thus, in addition to cha:ţa "the tea" (long first vowel) and chaţa "licking" (no long vowels), we have cha:ţa: "tea and all that comes with it" (both long vowels).

Consonant clusters

Native Bangla (tôdbhôb) words do not allow initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC (i.e. one vowel flanked by a consonant on each side). Many speakers of Bangla restrict their phonology to this pattern, even when using Sanskrit or English borrowings, such as geram (CV.CVC) for gram (CCVC) "village" or iskul (VC.CVC) for skul (CCVC) "school".

Sanskrit (tôtshôm) words borrowed into Bangla, however, possess a wide range of clusters, expanding the maximum syllable structure to CCCVC. Some of these clusters, such as the mr in mrittu "death" or the sp in spôshţo "clear", have become extremely common, and can be considered legal consonant clusters in Bangla. Other commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include pr (proshno "question"), br (brishţi "rain"), bhr (bhromon "travel"), tr (trish "thirty"), dr (druto "rapid"), kr (krimi "worm"), gr (gram "village"), sr (sromik "worker"), str (stri "woman"), sth (sthanio "local"), and sn (snan "bath").

Less commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include dhr (dhrubo "fixed, permanent"), ghr (ghrina "disgust"), ml (mlan "melancholy"), nr (nritto "dance"), sph (sphurti "delight"), st (stômbho "tower"), and skh (skhôlon "slip").

English and other foreign (bideshi) borrowings add even more cluster types into the Bangla inventory, further increasing the syllable capacity to CCCVCCCC, as commonly-used loanwords such as ţren "train" and glash "glass" are now even included in leading Bangla dictionaries. Clusters from English borrowings include bl (blauz "blouse"), thr (thru or thrute "through, via"), ţr (ţrak "truck"), đr (đraivar "driver"), fr (frans "France"), fl (flaiţ "flight"), spl (splêsh "splash"), sţ (sţeshon "station"), sţr (sţreiţ "straight"), skr (skru "screw"), and sm (smarţ "smart"). Furthermore, some clusters occasionally found in Sanskrit borrowings are now more commonly heard in English borrowings. These clusters include pl (plen "plane"), kl (klash "class"), gl (glash "glass"), sl (sloli "slowly"), spr (spring "spring"), and sk (skarţ "skirt").

Most final consonant clusters were borrowed into Bangla from English, as in lifţ "lift, elevator" and bêņk "bank". However, final clusters do exist in some native Bangla words, although rarely in standard pronunciation. One example of a final cluster in a standard Bangla word would be gônj, which is found in names of hundreds of cities and towns across Bengal, including Nôbabgônj and Manikgônj. Some nonstandard varieties of Bangla make use of final clusters quite often. For example, in some Purbo (eastern) dialects, final consonant clusters consisting of a nasal and its corresponding oral stop are common, as in chand "moon". The Standard Bangla equivalent of chand would be chñad, with a nasalized vowel instead of the final cluster.

Grammar

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Bangla nouns are not assigned gender, which leads to minimal changing of adjectives (called inflection). However, nouns and pronouns are highly declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated.

Word order

As a Head-Final language, Bangla follows Subject Object Verb-word order, although variations to this theme are highly common. Bangla makes use of postpositions, as opposed to the prepositions used in English and other European languages. Determiners follow the noun, while numerals, adjectives, and possessors precede the noun.

Yes-no questions do not require any change to the basic word order; instead, the low (L) tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling (HL) tone. Additionally optional particles (e.g. [-ki], [-na], etc.) are often encliticized onto the first word of a yes-no question.

Wh-questions are formed by fronting the wh-word to focus position, which is typically the first or second word in the utterance.

Nouns

Nouns and pronouns are inflected for case, including nominative, objective, genitive (possessive), and locative. The case marking pattern for each noun being inflected depends on the noun's degree of animacy. When a definite article such as -ţa (singular) or -gula (plural) is added, as in the tables below, nouns are also inflected for number.

When counted, nouns must also be accompanied by the appropriate measure word. As in many Asian languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.), nouns in Bangla cannot be counted directly by adding the numeral directly adjacent to the noun. The noun's measure word (MW) must be used in between the numeral and the noun. Most nouns take the generic measure word ţa, although there are many more specific measure words, such as jon, which is only used to count humans.

Measuring nouns in Bangla without their corresponding measure words (e.g. aţ biŗal instead of aţ-ţa biŗal "eight cats") would typically be considered ungrammatical. However, omitting the noun and preserving the measure word is grammatical and not uncommon to hear. For example, Shudhu êk-jon thakbe. (lit. "Only one-MW will remain.") would be understood to mean "Only one person will remain.", since jon can only be used to count humans. The word lok "person" is implied.

Verbs

Verbs divide into two classes: finite and non-finite. 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. Conditional, imperative, and other special inflections for mood can replace the tense and aspect suffixes.

While the syntax of Bangla is not drastically different across the various dialects, the inflectional suffixes in the morphology of Bangla vary from region to region.

Vocabulary

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The typical Bangla dictionary lists 75,000 separate words, of which 50,000 (67%) are considered tôtshôm (direct reborrowings from Sanskrit), 21,100 (28%) are tôdbhôb (native Bangla vocabulary), and the rest being bideshi (foreign) and deshi (indigenous Austroasiatic) words.

However, these figures do not take into account the fact that a huge chunk of these words are archaic or highly technical, minimizing their actual usage. The productive vocabulary used in modern literary works, in fact, is made up mostly (67%) of tôdbhôb words, while tôtshôm only make up 25% of the total. Deshi and bideshi words together make up the remaining 8% of the vocabulary used in modern Bengali literature.

Due to centuries of contact with Europeans, Mughals, Arabs, Persians, and East Asians, Bangla has absorbed countless words from foreign languages, often totally integrating these borrowings into the core vocabulary. The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three different kinds of contact. Close contact with neighboring peoples facilitated the borrowing of words from Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Burmese, and several indigenous Austroasiatic languages of Bengal. After centuries of invasions from Persia and the Middle East, numerous Turkish, Arabic, and Persian words were absorbed and fully integrated into the lexicon. Later, European colonialism brought words from Portuguese, French, Dutch, and most significantly English.

Variation in dialects

Dialectual differences in Bangla manifest themselves in three forms: standardized dialect vs. regional dialect, literary language vs. colloquial language and lexical influences.

Phonological variations

There are marked dialectal differences between the speech of Bengalis living on the Poshchim (western) side and Purbo (eastern) side of the Padma River.

Fricatives

In the dialects prevalent in much of eastern Bangladesh (Barisal, Chittagong, Dhaka and Sylhet divisions), many of the stops and affricates heard in Kolkata Bangla are pronounced as fricatives.

Poshchim Bangla palato-alveolar affricates চ [tʃ], ছ [tʃ^h], জ [[[Template:IPA]]], and ঝ [[[Template:IPA]]] correspond to Purbo Bangla চʻ [ts], ছ় [s], জʻ [dz], and ঝ় [z]. A similar pronunciation is also found in Assamese, a related language across the border in India.

The aspirated velar stop খ [[[Template:IPA]]] and the aspirated labial stop ফ [[[Template:IPA]]] of Poshchim Bangla correspond to খ় [x] and ফ় [f] in many dialects of Purbo Bangla. These pronunciations are most extreme in the Sylheti dialect of extreme northeastern Bangladesh -- the dialect of Bangla most common in the United Kingdom.

Many Purbo Bangla dialects share phonological features with Assamese, including the debuccalization of শ [[[Template:IPA]]] to হ [h] or খ় [x].

Tibeto-Burman influence

The influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Purbo Bangla is seen through the lack of nasalized vowels, a more fronted place of articulation for the apico-postalveolar stops ট [[[Template:IPA]]], ঠ [[[Template:IPA]]], ড [[[Template:IPA]]], and ঢ [[[Template:IPA]]], and the lack of distinction between র [[[Template:IPA]]] and ড়/ঢ় [[[Template:IPA]]].

Unlike most Indic languages, some Purbo Bangla dialects do not include the breathy voiced stops ঘ [[[Template:IPA]]], ঝ [[[Template:IPA]]], ঢ [[[Template:IPA]]], ধ [[[Template:IPA]]], and ভ [[[Template:IPA]]].

Some variants of Bangla, particularly Chittagonian and Chakma Bangla (considered by some to be separate languages), have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker's voice can distinguish words.

Lexical variations

The third major factor in dialectical difference, specifically between the dialects of West Bengal and Bangladesh, is a lexical one. Even in Standard Bengali, vocabulary items often divide along the split between the predominantly Muslim Bangladeshi populace and largely Hindu West Bengali populace. Due to their cultural and religious traditions, Muslims occasionally utilize Perso-Arabic words instead of the Sanskrit-derived forms.

Some examples of lexical alternation between standard West Bengali forms (or commonly called Hindu forms) and their corresponding standard Bangladeshi forms (or commonly called Muslim forms) are as follows:

• hello: nômoshkar (S) corresponds to assalamualaikum/slamalikum (A)
• invitation: nimontron/nimontonno (S) corresponds to daoat (A)
• guest: otithi (S) corresponds to mehman (P)
• sir: môshae (S) corresponds to shaheb (A)
• bath/shower: snan/chan (S) corresponds to gosol (A)
• water: jôl (S) corresponds to pani (S/Hindi)
• meat: mangsho (S) corresponds to gosh/goshto/gosto (P)
• prayer: prarthona (S) corresponds to doa (A)
• God: Bhôgoban, Ishshor (S) corresponds to Allah (A), Khoda (P)
• mother: ma (S) corresponds to amma (A)
• father: baba (S) corresponds to abba (A)
• maternal aunt: mashi (S) corresponds to khala (A)
• paternal aunt: pishi (S) corresponds to fupi/fupu (P)
• paternal uncle: kaka (S) corresponds to chacha (S/Hindi)

(here S = derived from Sanskrit; A = derived from Arabic, P = derived from Persian)

The differences above depend on the region contemplated and are not always clearly distinct. For example, many people in West Bengal continue to use the words chan and gosol (or nimontron and daoat) interchangeably with no particular bias towards one word or the other; a similar situation prevails (even among Muslims) in Hindu majority and Western regions of Bangladesh. Additionally, baba and ma are also heard often in Bangladesh.

Though jôl, pani, kaka, and chacha are all Sanskrit derivatives, pani and chacha became more associated with the Hindustani language that imbibed so much of Mughal culture and so became the word of choice for Muslim speakers of Bangla.

Furthermore, there are cases where speakers of Standard Bangla in West Bengal will use a different word than a speaker of Standard Bangla in Bangladesh, even though both words are of native Bangla descent. Because each pair of words is made up of only native vocabulary, the choice of which word to use is not based on one's religion, but on regional usage. Examples of such cases are listed below, with the West Bengali standard marked (W) and the Bangladeshi standard marked (E):

• salt: nun (W) corresponds to lôbon (E)
• turmeric: holdi (W) corresponds to holud (E)
• chili pepper: lôngka (W) corresponds to morich (E)
• with: shôngge (W) corresponds to shathe (E)
• husband's sister: thakurjhi (W) corresponds to nônod (E)

Note that these differences reflect the vocabulary of the standard varieties of Bangla in West Bengali and Bangladesh. Variation in the vocabulary of the countless regional dialects of both West Bengal and Bangladesh are even more pronounced.

Bangla literature

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The first evidence of Bangla literature is Charyapada or Charyageeti, buddhist hymns or dohas from the 8th century.

Image:Rabindranath.png Possibly the most prolific writer in Bangla is Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore dominated both the Bengali and Indian philosophical and literary scene for decades. His 2,000 Rabindrasangeets play a pivotal part in defining Bengali culture, both in West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is the author of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, both composed in Bangla. Other notable Bangla works of his are Gitanjali, a book of poems for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and many short stories and a few novels.

In a similar category is Kazi Nazrul Islam, a Muslim who was invited to post-partition Bangladesh as the National Poet and whose work transcends sectarian boundaries. Adored by Bengalis both in Bangladesh and West Bengal, his work includes 3,000 songs, known as nazrul geeti. He is frequently called the rebel poet mainly because of his most famous and electrifying poem "Bidrohi" or "The Rebel", and also because of his strong sympathy and support for revolutionary activities leading to India's independence from British Rule. His songs and poems were frequently used during the Bangladesh Liberation War as well.

Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a Christian by conversion, is best known for his Ramayana-based masterpiece, "The Slaying of Meghnadh," (in Bengali "Meghnadh Bôdh Kabbo" (মেঘনাদ বধ কাব্য)), which essentially follows in the poetic tradition of Milton's Paradise Lost. Michael Madhusudan Dutta is also credited with the introduction of sonnets to Bangla literature.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay was one of the earliest Bengali novelists and is popularly known as the author of India's first national song, "Bônde Matôrom" (pronounced in Hindi Vande Mātaram). Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, a prolific novelist, was one of the most popular Bengali writers of the 20th century. Tarashankar Bandopadhay was another famous novelist whose works feature a realistic picture of the many-colored fabric of life in rural Bengal.

Jibanananda Das was a famous poet who, along with Buddhadev Basu, marks the beginning of the move to transcend the Tagore legacy. The new genere of Bengali poets departed considerably from Tagore's ideological style and adoped realism in their writing more pronouncedly. Titled polli-kobi (Poet of the Village) for works relating to the villages and countryside of Bengal, Jasimuddin is particularly famous for his poems that have become major highlights for pedagogical purposes in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Seminal Hindu religious works in Bangla include the many songs of Ramprasad Sen. His works (still sung today) from the 17th century cover an range of emotional responses to the goddess Kali, detailing complex philosophical statements based on Vedanta teachings and more visceral prouncements of his love of the goddess. There are also the laudatory accounts of the lives and teachings of the Vaishnava saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (the Choitanno Choritamrit) and Devi Advaitist Shri Ramakrishna (the Ramakrishna Kathamrita, translated roughly as Gospel of Ramakrishna). There is also a large body of Islamic literature, that can be traced back atleast to Noornama by Abdul Hakim. Bishad Sindhu depicting the death of Hussain in Karbala is very popular novel written by Mir Mosharraf Hossain. Later works influenced by Islam include devotional songs written by Nazrul, and popularized by Abbas Uddin, among others.

The mystic Bauls of the Bengal countryside who preached the boundless spiritual truth of Shôhoj Pôth (the Simple, Natural Path) and a restless spiritual quest for man's innermost divinity, which sometimes they called Moner Manush (The Man of The Heart) and sometimes Auchin Pakhi (Unknown Bird), drew on various Islamic Sufi-istic, Buddhistic and Vaisnavite Shohojiya philosophies in a syncretic fashion to propound their transcendental truths in song format, traveling from village to village proclaiming that there was no such thing as Hindu, Muslim or Christian, only moner manush.

The literature discussed so far can be more or less regarded as the common heritage of both Bangladesh and West Bengal. Since the partition of Bengal in 1947, the east and west parts of Bengal have also developed their own distinctive literatures. For example, the Naxalite movement has influenced much of West Bengal's literature, whereas the Liberation War has had a similarly profound impact on Bangladeshi literature.

Major literary figures in Bangladesh include Shamsur Rahman, Sufia Kamal, Hasan Azizul Huq, Akhtaruzzaman Ilias and Humayun Azad , to name a few. Some notable writers from West Bengal are Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shankha Ghosh, Shakti Chattopadhyay, Mahasweta Devi and Joy Goswami.

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Modern history

Until the 18th century, Bangla did not have a well-documented grammar. Bangla existed as a collection of thousands of dialects. The first written Bangla grammar, Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes, was written by Manoel da Assumpcam, a Portuguese missionary. Assumpcam wrote this grammar between 1734 and 1742 while he was serving in Bhawal. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a British grammarian, is credited as being the first to write a Bangla grammar using Bangla texts and letters for illustration: A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali Reformer, also published a book "Grammar of the Bengali Language" in 1832. Since then, the written form of Bengali has gone under numerous changes. Perhaps the most important was the adoption of Cholti Bhasha over Shadhu Bhasha (an archaic form of the language) as the form of choice for written Bangla. Spoken and written Bangla continues to evolve in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

Language movements

There have been several incidents of popular uprisings to protect the status of Bangla. Most notable among these is the Language movement of 1952, in East Pakistan. There have been other incidents in Bangla-speaking regions of India as well.

Between the years of 1947 and 1971, what is now known as Bangladesh was part of Pakistan (and first known as East Bengal and later East Pakistan). Around 1950-52, the emerging middle class of East Bengal underwent an uprising known later as the Bhasha Andolon, or Language Movement. Bengalis (then East Pakistanis) were initially agitated by a decision by the central Pakistani government to establish Urdu as the sole national language for all of Pakistan, despite the fact that Bangla was spoken by the majority of the population. On February 21, 1952, Bengali students and activists walked into military and police fire and a number of them were killed. UNESCO decided to observe 21 February as International Mother Language Day.

In 1961, the Government of the Indian state of Assam passed legislation making the use of Assamese language compulsory. This legislation resulted in widespread protest across Assam. In one such incident, 11 people were killed due to police firing in Silchar in southern Assam. Coming under intense pressure, the Government withdrew the legislation.

See also

• Language Martyrs' Day
• Language Movement
• Music of Bangladesh
• Music of Bengal
• Bengali cinema
• List of national languages of India
• List of Indian languages by total speakers

External links

Template:InterWiki

• Bengali Language: A Brief Overview
• Ethnologue report for Bengali
• Bengali Language: A Brief Introduction
• Link to Sylheti dialect of Bangladesh
• Ranking of Languages by Native Speakers
• Transliterator Transliterate online from Romanised (english alphabets) to Unicode Bengali
• Samsad Bengali-English dictionary. 3rd ed. online. Requires unicode enabled browser (such as Firefox).

Notes

<references />

References

Template:Col-begin Template:Col-2

| Surname1    = Alam
| Given1      = M
| Year        = 2000
| Title       = Bhasha Shourôbh: Bêkorôn O Rôchona (The Fragrance of Language: Grammar and Rhetoric)
| Publisher   = S. N. Printers, Dhaka

| Surname1    = Cardona
| Given1      = G
| Surname2    = Jain
| Given2      = D
| Year        = 2003
| Title       = The Indo-Aryan languages 
| Publisher   = RoutledgeCurzon, London

| Surname1    = Chatterji 
| Given1      = SK 
| Year        = 1921
| Title       = Bengali Phonetics
| Journal     = Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies

| Surname1    = Chatterji
| Given1      = SK
| Year        = 1926
| Title       = The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language: Part II
| Publsher    = Calcutta Univ. Press

| Surname1    = Ferguson
| Given1      = CA
| Surname2    = Chowdhury
| Given2      = M
| Year        = 1960
| Title       = The Phonemes of Bengali
| Journal     = Language, 36(1), Part 1

| Surname1    = Hayes 
| Given1      = B
| Surname2    = Lahiri
| Given2      = A
| Year        = 1991
| Title       = Bengali intonational phonology
| Journal     = Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
| Publisher   = Springer Science

| Surname1      = Klaiman
| Given1    = MH
| Year        = 1987
| Chapter     = Bengali
| Editor      = Bernard Comrie
| Title       = The World's Major Languages
| Publisher  =  Croon Helm, London and Sydney

Template:Col-2

| Surname1    = Masica
| Given1      = C
| Year        = 1991
| Title       = The Indo-Aryan Languages
| Publisher  = Cambridge Univ. Press

| Surname1    = Radice
| Given1      = W
| Year        = 1994
| Title       = Teach Yourself Bengali: A Complete Course for Beginners
| Publisher   = Hodder Headlin, London

| Surname1    = Ray
| Given1      = P
| Surname2    = Hai
| Given2      = MA
| Surname3    = Ray
| Given3      = L
| Year        = 1966
| Title       = Bengali language handbook
| Publisher   = Center for Applied Linguistics, Washington

| Surname1    = Sen
| Given1      = D
| Year        = 1996
| Title       = Bengali Language and Literature
| Publisher     = International Centre for Bengal Studies, Calcutta