Bengali · বাংলা

About Bengali

Language family

Indo-European, Indo-Aryan

Where it's spoken

Bangladesh and West Bengal, India

Speakers

roughly 270 million speakers, among the most spoken languages in the world

Bengali developed from Sanskrit-descended Magadhi Prakrit dialects of eastern India and has one of the richest modern literary traditions on the subcontinent, anchored by Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European Nobel laureate in Literature. Language became a defining political issue in the region: the 1952 Language Movement for Bengali recognition in what was then East Pakistan is directly tied to the founding of Bangladesh and is commemorated internationally as UN Mother Language Day. It is written in its own Brahmi-derived script, closely related to but distinct from Devanagari.