Bengali belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan language family and can be traced back from at least the last thousand years.

The Bengali speaking population of the world is roughly 250 million people. The largest Bengali speaking population is concentrated in Bangladesh and India, along with some in various Gulf countries, European countries and North America. Bengali is an official language in Bangladesh and Indian states like West Bengal, Assam and Tripura.

Bengali dialects

The Bengali dialects are classified as: written dialects, spoken dialects and regional dialects.

The spoken types of Bengali dialects include but are not limited to: Choltibhasha (which follows the rules of the written dialect Choltibhasha) and Ancholik. Apart from these there are different variations of spoken dialects corresponding to the different rural areas.

The written Bengali dialects include the Shadhubhasha and Choltibhasha. Shadhubhasha is the older form of written Bengali dialect, which was commonly used during the initial period when Bengali was standardized by Iswar Vidhyasagar, a famous linguist of those days. Shadhubhasha was more influenced by Sanskrit and was mostly used by the priests, rather than common man. The Indian national anthem was written in Shadhubhasha.

Choltibhasha or Chalitbhasha is the Standard written dialect of Bengali today and was developed almost in the same period when Shadhubhasha came in existence. It was, however, created in a form that would be easily understood by the common man.

The Bengali regional dialects can be divided into: western dialects, eastern dialects, northern dialects and southern dialects. The western Bengali dialects are sub-divided as Western Central dialects and Western border dialects. The Western Central dialects were the ones from which the standard spoken form of Bengali language has been derived. The Western border dialect is mainly the Manbhum dialect.

The different Eastern dialects are respectively grouped according to the different locations in the East of Bangladesh, namely: Barisal, Chittagong, Comilla, Faridpur, Noakhali, Manikganj, Mymensingh, Munshiganj and Sylhet.

Southern Bengali dialects are the: Chaudanga dialect, Jessore dialect and Khulna dialect.
Northern dialects are the Bogra dialect, Dinajpur dialect, Rangpur dialect and Pabna dialect.

Salient characteristics of Bengali

In Bengali, the written forms of the vowels can be written as independent letters. The consonants have inbuilt vowels with dual pronunciations.

The punctuation marks in Bengali are adopted from the Western world languages. The letters of Bengali are written hanging to a horizontal line, and the presence or absence of this horizontal line are important, as a character with horizontal line could mean something different than that without a horizontal line.