বাংলা 
English 
The chief spoken and written language of the Bengali nation is Bengali. By the number of native speakers Bengali is the fourth largest language of the Indo-European language family and the sixth largest in the world. By total number of users Bengali is the seventh largest language in the world. Many major institutions have researched the number of languages. Among them the SIL study can be called the largest. SIL's full name is the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
This US-based international organization's research says the total number of languages in the whole world was 6,909 as counted in 2009.
One might ask, why can no trace be found of so many languages? There are many reasons. Many languages lie hidden, many are on the verge of extinction, many have changed into something different through change, and perhaps only a handful of people speak some languages. Papua New Guinea can be taken as an example. There the population is less than 4 million, yet there are 832 separate languages!
Among so very many languages across the world, our language is unique. Nowhere did anyone give their life for any other language, and nowhere was there a fight-to-the-death struggle, battle and movement over the demand for a language. Our love and pride in our dear mother tongue, our dear Bengali language, is therefore so very much greater.
