English & Bangla Online Dictionary & Grammar ইংরেজি ও বাংলা Online অভিধান ও ব্যাকরণ

The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three types of contact. Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words (e.g. আট বিড়াল aṭ biṛal instead of আটটা বিড়াল aṭ-ṭa biṛal “eight cats”) would typically be considered ungrammatical. There is also the classifier -khana, and its diminutive form -khani, which attaches only to nouns denoting something flat, long, square, or thin. Most nouns take the generic measure word -টা -ṭa, though other measure words indicate semantic classes (e.g. -জন -jôn for humans).

Bengali Consonants (ব্যঞ্জনবর্ণ – Benjonborno) – 39 Essential Letters

The 3rd article of the Constitution of Bangladesh states Bengali to be the sole official language of Bangladesh. Bengali is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand, and sizeable minorities of Bengali speakers reside in Indian cities outside Bengal, including Delhi, Mumbai, Thane, Varanasi, and Vrindavan. Besides the native region it is also spoken by the Bengalis living in Tripura, southern Assam and the Bengali population in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In 2024, the government of India conferred Bengali with the status of classical language. However, in 2022, the UN did adopt Bangla as an unofficial language, after a resolution tabled by India.

Other related languages in the nearby region also make use of the Bengali script like the Meitei language in the Indian state of Manipur, where the Meitei language has been written in the Bengali script for centuries, though the Meitei script has been promoted in recent times. For example, the combination of the consonants ক্ k and ষ ʂ is graphically realised as ক্ষ and is pronounced kkʰo (as in রুক্ষ rukkʰo “coarse”), kʰɔ (as in ক্ষমতা kʰɔmota “capability”) or even kʰo (as in ক্ষতি kʰoti “harm”), depending on the position of the cluster in a word. The inherent vowel attached to every consonant can be either ɔ or o depending on vowel harmony (স্বরসঙ্গতি) with the preceding or following vowel or on the context, but this phonological information is not captured by the script, creating ambiguity for the reader. In general, the Bengali-Assamese script is fairly transparent for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, i.e., it is easier to predict the pronunciation from spelling of the words, though there are many cases where pronunciation is different from what is written. It is a cursive script with eleven graphemes or signs denoting nine vowels and two diphthongs, and thirty-nine graphemes representing banglabet-bet.com/ consonants and other modifiers.

Browse complete list of words Stay up to date on the latest lesson with a free newsletter from us. Bengali has different dialects in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

• The potential influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Eastern Bengali is used to explain the lack of nasalised vowels and an alveolar articulation of what are categorised as the “cerebral” consonants (as opposed to the postalveolar articulation of western Bengal).
• Often, syllable-final consonant graphemes, though not marked by a hôsôntô, may carry no inherent vowel sound (as in the final ন in মন mon or the medial ম in গামলা ɡamla).
• To represent a vowel in isolation from any preceding or following consonant, the independent form of the vowel is used.
• Bengali has minimal gender distinctions compared to other Indo-Aryan languages.

Question Formation

Furthermore, the inherent vowel is often not pronounced at the end of a syllable, as in কম kɔm “less”, but this omission is not generally reflected in the script, making it difficult for the new reader. But the script is fairly opaque for phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, i.e., it is often quite difficult to predict the spelling from the pronunciation of the words. After the Partition of India in the 20th century, the Pakistani government attempted to institute the Perso-Arabic script as the standard for Bengali in East Pakistan; this was met with resistance and contributed to the Bengali language movement. Throughout history, there have been instances of the Bengali language being written in different scripts, though these employments were never popular on a large scale and were communally limited.

Verbs

In spite of some modifications in the 19th century, the Bengali spelling system continues to be based on the one used for Sanskrit, and thus does not take into account some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language. One kind of inconsistency is due to the presence of several letters in the script for the same sound. In general, the script is fairly transparent for “tadbhav” words (native Bengali words).

These allographs, called কার kar, are diacritical vowel forms and cannot stand on their own. Often, syllable-final consonant graphemes, though not marked by a hôsôntô, may carry no inherent vowel sound (as in the final ন in মন mon or the medial ম in গামলা ɡamla). To emphatically represent a consonant sound without any inherent vowel attached to it, a special diacritic, called the hôsôntô (্), may be added below the basic consonant grapheme (as in ম্ m).

Bengali is also spoken by the Bengali diasporas (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) across Europe, North America, the Middle East and other regions. It is also the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. It is primarily spoken by the Bengali people, native to the Bengal region (Bangladesh, India’s West Bengal) as well as in Barak Valley in Assam and Tripura in South Asia. Bengali,a also known by its endonym Bangla,b is a classical Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family.

For example, in মই moj “ladder” and in ইলিশ iliʃ “Hilsa fish”, the independent form of the vowel ই is used (cf. the dependent formি). In these consonant-vowel ligatures, the so-called “inherent” vowel ɔ is first expunged from the consonant before adding the vowel, but this intermediate expulsion of the inherent vowel is not indicated in any visual manner on the basic consonant sign ম mɔ. Similarly, the graphs মা ma, মী mi, মু mu, মূ mu, মৃ mri, মে me~mɛ, মৈ moj, মো mo and মৌ mow represent the same consonant ম combined with seven other vowels and two diphthongs. For example, the graph মি mi represents the consonant m followed by the vowel i, where i is represented as the diacritical allograph ি (called ই-কার i-kar) and is placed before the default consonant sign.