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Bengali

Bengali

Summary

Bengali is natively spoken by approximately 280 million people, primarily in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, making it one of the most spoken languages in the world. It is central to Bengali cultural identity, known for its rich literary tradition, music, and festivals such as Durga Puja. Written in the Bengali script, the language has a subject-object-verb (SOV) word order and uses postpositions instead of prepositions, with a relatively simple tense system and no grammatical gender.

Stats

  • Language Family: Indo-European

  • Writing System: Eastern Nagari

  • Writing System Type: Abugida

  • Writing Direction: L to R

  • Tones / Pitch Accent: N

  • Morphology: Fusional

  • Cases: 4

  • Grammatical Gender / Noun Class: 0

  • Number of Verb Tenses: 3

  • Word Order: SOV

  • Number of Vowels (Monophthongs): 14

  • Number of Consonants: 29

Areas Where Spoken

  • Bangladesh (official) (97.7%) (167 mil)

  • India (8.0%) (114 mil)

Resources

Books


Websites


TV

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