Bengali language

Bengali
Bengali
Bangla
বাংলা
	The word "Bangla" in Bengali script
Pronunciation	[ˈbaŋla] (listen)
Native to	Bangladesh and India
Region	Bengal
Ethnicity	Bengalis
Native speakers	300 million (2011–2017)[1][2]; L2 speakers: 37 million[1]
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Eastern Bengali–Assamese Bengali; ; ; ; ;
Early forms	Magadhi Prakrit Magadhan Apabhraṃśa Abahattha Old Bengali ; ; ;
Dialects	see Bengali dialects;
Writing system	Bengali; Bengali Braille; See below for alternatively used and historic scripts;
Signed forms	Bengali signed forms[3]
Official status
Official language in	Bangladesh (national); India; West Bengal; Tripura; Assam (Barak Valley); Jharkhand (additional)[4];
Regulated by	Bangla Academy (in Bangladesh); Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi (in India)
Language codes
ISO 639-1	bn
ISO 639-2	ben
ISO 639-3	ben
Glottolog	beng1280
	Map of Bengali language in Bangladesh and India (district-wise). Darker shades imply a greater percentage of native speakers of Bengali in each district.
	Bengali-speaking diaspora Worldwide.
	This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Bengali (/bɛnˈɡɔːli/ ben-GAW-lee),[5][6] generally known by its endonym Bangla (বাংলা, Bengali pronunciation: [ˈbaŋla]), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India. With approximately 300 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers,[1] Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world.[7][8] Bengali is the fifth most spoken Indo-European language.

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22 Official Languages of the Indian Republic

This article contains Bengali text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols.

Bengali is the official and national language of Bangladesh,[9][10][11] with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language.[12][13] Within India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. It is also the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011.[4] It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal,[14] and is spoken by significant populations in other states including Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha and Uttarakhand.[15] Bengali is also spoken by the Bengali diasporas (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and other countries.[16]

Bengali has developed over more than 1,300 years. Bengali literature, with its millennium-old literary history, was extensively developed during the Bengali Renaissance and is one of the most prolific and diverse literary traditions in Asia. The Bengali language movement from 1948 to 1956 demanding Bengali to be an official language of Pakistan fostered Bengali nationalism in East Bengal leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1999, UNESCO recognised 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the language movement.[17][18]

Indo-Aryan language in Bengal region / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia