বাংলা 
English 
The local language of the Bengal region of South Asia; this region is today politically composed of the independent state Bangladesh and India's state of West Bengal. Besides, Bengali is also spoken in India's Tripura state, the Barak valley of Assam, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands. The script of this language is the Bengali script. It is the language of nearly 220 million local people of this region and 300 million people of the world in total, and this language holds fourth place among the most widely spoken languages of the world. The national anthems of Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka, and India's national song, are written in this language, and the importance of this language in South Asia is understood from that very fact.
In the Bengali language current in Bangladesh and West Bengal there is sameness in usage, pronunciation and phonetics. At present Bengali and its various dialects are the principal language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken language in India. As a result of the Bengali renaissance, this language built a rich history of pure Bengali literature and wove the cultural diversity of Bengal in one thread; not only that, this language played a most important role in shaping Bengali nationalism. The Bengali language movement organized in erstwhile Pakistan in 1947-52 forged the link between this language and Bengali nationalism. On 21 February 1952, at Dhaka University, protesting students and activists sacrificed their lives demanding the right to speak and write in the mother tongue Bengali. In recognition of their sacrifice for the mother tongue, UNESCO declared 21 February International Mother Language Day in 1999.
Between the 10th and 12th centuries of the Christian era, Bengali and other early Indo-Aryan languages emerged from early middle Indo-Aryan language groups such as Magadhi Prakrit and Pali. In this region the spoken language was first recorded in the Magadhi Prakrit or Ardhamagadhi language. From the beginning of the 10th century of the Christian era, the apabhramsa languages emerged from Magadhi Prakrit, just as from the other Prakrit languages of northern India. The local apabhramsa languages of the early subcontinent, known as Purvi Apabhramsa or Abahattha, were gradually transformed into the regional spoken language, which ultimately gave birth to the Odia language and the Bengali-Assamese and Bihari language groups. Although some linguists hold that these three languages were born in the year 1000, this language did not take any definite form at that time; at that time its various written and colloquial forms existed side by side. For example, it is held that the Abahattha emerged from the Magadhi apabhramsa in about the 6th century, and that it coexisted for some time with the proto-Bengali languages.
In the age of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and at the time of the Bengali renaissance, Bengali literature was greatly influenced by the Sanskrit language. Although the words taken from Sanskrit into the Bengali language changed their pronunciation in other Bengali ways, the Sanskrit spelling was kept unchanged. The Muslim ruling class of Bengal expanded the range of the Bengali language. Bengali, alongside Persian, was recognized as the official language of the Sultanate of Bengal and was used widely. Besides, proto-Bengali was the language of the Pala Empire and the Sena Empire.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, modern Bengali literature grew up on the basis of the western-middle colloquial Bengali language current in the Nadia region. There is much sameness in the language used in the Bengali language and modern Bengali literature across the various regional spoken languages. Modern Bengali vocabulary takes the place of words from the Magadhi Prakrit, Pali, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Austroasiatic language groups and the words of other language families.
The history of the Bengali language is generally divided into three parts:
- Ancient Bengali (900/1000 - 1400 AD) - the Charyapada and devotional songs are the written witnesses of this period. In this period the appearance of inflections such as the pronouns ami, tumi and so on and -ila, -iba and so on took place.
- Middle Bengali (1400-1800 AD) - Chandidas's Srikrishnakirtan is an important written witness of this period. The loss of the final 'a' sound of words, the spread of yogic verbs, and the influence of the Persian language can be noticed in the literature of this period. Some linguists divide this age into the adi (early) and antya (late) parts.
- Modern Bengali (from 1800 AD to the present) - in this period contraction took place between verbs and pronouns, such as tahar becoming tar; koriyachil becoming korechil.
Before the 18th century no initiative was taken to compose a Bengali grammar. Between 1734 and 1742, while working at the Bhawal zamindari, the Portuguese missionary padre Manuel da Assumpcao composed the first dictionary and grammar of the Bengali language named Vocabulario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes (Portuguese: Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes). The English grammarian Nathaniel Brassey Halhed composed a modern Bengali grammar in a book named A Grammar of the Bengal Language (English: A Grammar of the Bengal Language), in which the Bengali alphabet was used in printing for the first time. The Bengali social reformer Raja Ram Mohan Ray composed a grammar book named Grammar of the Bengali Language (English: Grammar of the Bengali Language) in 1832. In 1951-52, as a result of the strong language consciousness of the Bengali people in East Pakistan, a language movement arose named the Bengali language movement. In this movement a demand was made to the Pakistan government for official recognition of the Bengali language. In 1952, on 21 February, many students and political activists were killed on the Dhaka University campus. In Bangladesh, Language Movement Day is observed every year on 21 February. On 17 November 1999 UNESCO conferred on this day the status of International Mother Language Day.
Besides Bangladesh, in the 1960s a Bengali language movement took place in the Manbhum district of India's Bihar state. In the same way, a Bengali language movement was organized in the Barak valley of India's Assam state in 1961. On 19 May, 11 activists demanding Bengali were killed in police firing at Silchar. Bengali is the mother tongue of the Bengali inhabitants of the Bengal region. This region is composed of the independent state Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. Besides, this language is widely current in the southern part of India's Assam state. Most of the inhabitants of the union territory of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands speak Bengali.
Bengali is the national language and official language of the state of Bangladesh. Besides, Bengali is one of the 23 official languages recognized by the Indian constitution. Bengali is the official language of India's West Bengal, Assam and Tripura states; besides, Bengali is the principal language of India's Andaman and Nicobar islands. From September 2011, Bengali was recognized as the second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand. Bengali has been adopted as the second official language in the city of Karachi in Pakistan. In December 2002, Sierra Leone's then President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah recognized Bengali as an official language in recognition of the services of the 5,300 Bangladeshi peacekeepers stationed in that country. Two Bengali poems of the Nobel laureate Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore are adopted as the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. In 2009, elected representatives of Bangladesh and West Bengal demanded that Bengali be given the status of an official language of the United Nations.
There is at present diversity between the spoken and written forms of Bengali. Two kinds of writing style have been created in Bengali, enriched by various vocabularies.
- Sadhu Bhasha is one kind of written form of Bengali, in which highly influenced lengthy verb inflections, influenced by the tatsama vocabulary derived from Sanskrit and Pali languages, are used. Although this kind of language was widely used in Bengali literature in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, at present its use in this form in literature has practically ceased.
- Cholito Bhasha, known to linguists almost as manya cholito Bengali, is one kind of written form of Bengali in which the spoken idiom of human speech finds a place. In this writing style, relatively small verb inflections are used. In present Bengali literature this style is followed. In the middle of the 19th century, in Pyarichand Mitra's Alaler Gharer Dulal and other works, this style found its place in literature. This style was formed from the spoken dialect current in the Shantipur region of Nadia district, and as a result it is at times called Shantipuri Bengali or the Nadia dialect.
Although most Bengali literature is written in manya cholito Bengali, there is considerable diversity among the spoken Bengali dialects. The inhabitants of Kolkata and south-western West Bengal speak manya cholito Bengali. But the spoken language of the other regions of Bangladesh and West Bengal is much different from manya cholito Bengali. There is very little similarity between the spoken language of Bangladesh's Chittagong region and manya cholito Bengali. However, although most Bengalis are believed to be able to speak in more than one dialect, including manya cholito Bengali, when exchanging views among themselves, many linguists do not accept it.
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