Bengali

Geography

Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh and the state language of West Bengal, India. About 189 million people speak Bengali as their native language, making it one of the four most widely spoken languages in the world after Mandarin, English, and Spanish. Some estimates say that a quarter of a billion people will speak Bengali by the end of the millenium.

Alphabet / Script

Bengali is written in a script called the Bengali script. Like other Indian languages, the letters in the Bengali script are grouped together based on the way they are pronounced. The first 11 letters are all vowels. Then follows the consonants and finally the semi vowels.

The consonants are grouped based on how they are pronounced. First comes the velar consonants, then the palatal, the retroflex, the dental, and the labial consonants. Each group contains five consonants.

All the vowels come in two versions in the script: full vowel and vowel sign. The vowel sign is much simpler than the full vowel. It is used when a vowel follows a consonant. If a vowel follows another vowel, or if a words starts with a vowel, the full vowel is used. The is no pronunciation differences between full vowels and vowel signs.

The vowel signs are written next to the preceding consonant. Some vowel signs are written before, some after, some below, and some above the consonant. And one vowel sign is simply not written at all: the absense of a sign is the sign itself! This vowel is called the inherent vowel.

If two or more consonants are following each other, then the consonants are not written in full. Instead they "melt together" and form a new symbol. Some of these symbols are easy to recognize. However, some are very different from the full versions of the consonants.

Bengali uses the same punctuation marks as English, except for the full stop which is represented by a vertical line.

History

Bengali belongs to the Indo-European language group. It has a rich literature -- maybe one of the riches in the South Asian region. Nobel prize laureate Rabindranath Tagore, a world-famous writer, was from Bengal, and wrote in Bengali.