| Group |
Indic (with Sanskrit,
Pali etc.), New Indic (with Marathi,
Punjabi etc.) |
| Geography & History |
Bengali is listed among the five top languages of the world in the
number of speakers: in India, more than 70 million people, and in Bangladesh
- about 100 million. Two dialectal branches, eastern and western, not to
mention the specific dialect of Chittagong. The language of Bengali literature
has two major styles: classical, which is more archaic and western-like;
and popular, closer to colloquial speech. Bengali is fixed in written documents
since the 10th century. |
| Phonetics & Morphology |
Bengali series of consonants are very much alike those of Hindi
and other Indic languages: cerebral, aspirated, affricates. Vowels have
lost their length, but acquired a kind of harmony in the verbal conjugation.
In Bengali, the Old Indic synthetic structure was totally broken: the gender
and case forms disappeared already in the Middle Ages, replaced by analytic
constructions. Today the latter tend to turn again into a new agglutinative
inflection. The number of the verb has been replaced by a set of degrees
of politeness. |
| Lexicon |
Plenty of new words were borrowed from Dravidian and Burmese languages:
this influence is thought to be the engine of the drastical changes of
Bengali as a whole. |
| Writing |
Bengali script |
| Close Contacts |
Bengali is often identified as an East Indic tongue together with its
close relatives: Oriya and Assamese. |
| Sample |
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| Picture |
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| More info |
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