Encyclopedia
Bengali or
Bangla is an Indo-Aryan
language of East
South Asia, evolved from Prakrit, Pali and
Sanskrit.
With nearly 200 million native speakers, Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages of the world . Bengali is the main language spoken in
Bangladesh, and the third most commonly spoken language in India . Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the
Indo-European languages.
Owing to the Bengal renaissance in the 19th and 20th centuries,
Bengali literature emerged among the richest in
South Asia, and includes luminaries such as
Rabindranath Tagore, the first
Asian to be awarded a
Nobel Prize.
History
Like most other modern Indic languages, Bengali arose from the Apabhramsha melting
pot of Middle Indic languages, around the turn of the first millennium CE. Some
argue for much earlier points of divergence - going back to even 500 BCE, but the language was not static, and different varieties co-existed concurrently, and authors often wrote in multiple dialects. In particular, the eastern region language known as Abahatta , had begun to emerge by the seventh century AD.
Hiuen Tsang has noted that the same language was spoken in most of Eastern India.
Bengali as a separate linguistic identity may have emerged around 1000 CE, and
three periods are identified in its history :
- Old Bengali : texts: Charyapada, devotional songs; emergence of proto-pronouns Ami, tumi, etc; verb inflections -ila, -iba, etc. Oriya and Assamese branch out in this period.
- Middle Bengali : texts: Chandidas's SrikrishnaKirtan; elision of word-final ô sound; spread of compound verbs; Persian influence.
- New Bengali : shortening of verbs and pronouns, among other changes .
Bengali is historically closer to Pali, and has seen a resurgence of
Sanskrit influence in Middle Bengali , and also during the Bengal Renaissance. Of the modern
Indo-European languages in South Asia, Bengali and
Marathi still retain a largely
Sanskrit vocabulary base while
Hindi and others tend to be more heavily weighted with
Arabic and
Persian influence.
Until the 18th century, there was no attempt to document the grammar for Bengali.
The first written Bengali dictionary/grammar,
Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes, was written by the
Portuguese missionary Manoel da Assumpcam between 1734 and 1742 while he was serving in Bhawal. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a
British grammarian, was the first to write a Bengali grammar using Bengali texts and script for illustration:
A Grammar of the Bengal Language .
Raja Ram Mohan Roy, the great Bengali Reformer, also wrote a "Grammar of the Bengali Language" . Even in this period, the
Choltibhasha form, using simplified inflections and other changes, was emerging from
Shadhubhasha as the form of choice for written Bengali. Spoken and written Bengali continue to evolve in both
West Bengal and
Bangladesh, and in the various regional dialects.
Bengali was the focus, in 1951-52, of the
Language movement in what was then East Pakistan . Although Bengali speakers were more numerous in the population of
Pakistan,
Urdu was legislated as the sole national language. On February 21, 1952, protesting students and activists walked into military and police fire in
Dhaka University and three young students and several
others were killed. Subsequently,
UNESCO has declared 21 February as
International Mother Language Day.
In a separate event, in May, 1961 11 people were killed in police firing in Silchar in southern
Assam protesting legislation making the use of Assamese language compulsory in the state. Eventually, the legislation was withdrawn.
Classification and related languages
Bengali is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language of the
Indo-European language family.
Assamese, Oriya, and Maithili, three other languages belonging to the Maghadan branch of the Indo-Aryan
language family, are very closely related to Bengali. Assamese, Oriya, and Bengali are considered by some to be nearly mutually intelligible; some local dialects of one language bear a striking resemblance to one or more dialects of the other two languages.
Sylheti, Chittagonian, and Chakma are some of the many languages that are often considered dialects of Bengali. Although these languages are mutually intelligible with neighboring dialects of Bengali, they would not be understood by a native speaker of Standard Bengali.
Geographical distribution
Bengali is native to the region of eastern
South Asia known as
Bengal, which comprises
Bangladesh and the
Indian state of
West Bengal. More than 98% of the total population of Bangladesh speak Bengali as a native language. It is the official language in Bangladesh and one of the official languages in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. There are significant Bengali-speaking communities in the Indian states of
Assam and
Tripura and in immigrant populations in the
West and the
Middle East. The national anthems of both
India and Bangladesh are written in Bengali.
Official status
Bengali is the 4th most widely spoken language of the world and the national and official language of
Bangladesh and one of the 14 regional languages recognized by the Union of India. It is the official language of the state of West Bengal and the co-official language of the state of
Tripura and union territory of
Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It was made an official language of
Sierra Leone in order to honour the Bangladeshi peace keeping force from
United Nations stationed there. It is also the official language of the three predominantly Sylheti-speaking districts of southern Assam: Silchar, Karimganj, and Hailakandi.
Spoken and literary variants
More than other languages of South Asia, Bengali exhibits strong diglossia between the formal, written language and the vernacular, spoken language. Two styles of writing, involving somewhat different vocabularies and syntax, have emerged:
- Shadhubhasha is the written language with longer verb inflections and a more Sanskrit-derived vocabulary . Songs such as India's national anthem Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem [i] of India [i]. ...
and national song Vande Mataram is the national song [i] of India [i]. ...
were composed in Shadhubhasha, but its use is on the wane in modern writing. - Choltibhasha or Cholitobhasha, a written Bengali style that reflects a more colloquial idiom, is increasingly the standard for written Bengali . This form came into vogue towards the turn of the 19th century, in an orthography promoted in the writings of Peary Chand Mitra , Pramatha Chowdhury and in the later writings of Rabindranath Tagore. It is modeled on the dialect spoken in the districts bordering the lower reaches of the Hooghly River particularly the Shantipur region in Nadia district, West Bengal. This form of Bengali is sometimes called the "Nadia standard".
Spoken Bengali exhibits far more variation than written Bengali. Formal spoken Bengali, including what is heard in news reports, speeches, announcements, and lectures, is modeled on Choltibhasha. This form of spoken Bengali stands alongside other spoken dialects, or
Ancholik Bangla . The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one dialect - often, speakers are fluent in Choltibhasha, one or more Ancholik dialect, and one or more forms of
Grammo Bangla , dialects specific to a village or town.
Dialects
Dialectical differences in Bengali manifest themselves in three forms: standardized dialect vs. regional dialect, literary language vs. colloquial language and lexical variations.
While the standard form of the language does not show much variation across the Bengali-speaking areas of South Asia, regional variation in spoken Bengali constitutes a dialect continuum. Eight groups are typically considered: Western, Southwestern, Central , Northern, Bahe, Eastern, Ganda, and Vanga, but this list is
very fluid.
Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. Similarly, Rajbangshi and Hajong are considered separate languages, although they are very similar to Northern Bengali dialects. Sylheti, closely related to Eastern Bengali, is often considered a separate language. Chittagonian
and Chakma are heavily influenced by the neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages, and are also typically considered separate languages from Bengali.
During standardization of Bengali in the late 19th and early 20th century, the cultural elite were mostly from the regions of
Kolkata and Nadia. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of the 19th century Kolkata elite. While this language has been standardized today through two centuries of education and media, variation is widespread, with many speakers familiar with or fluent in both their socio-geographical variety as well as the standard dialect used in the media.
Writing system
Bengali is written in the Bengali alphasyllabary , a Brahmic script similar to the
Devanagari alphasyllabary used for
Hindi,
Sanskrit, and many other Indic languages. The Bengali alphasyllabary is a
cursive script with 12
vowel characters and 52 consonant characters. As in all alphasyllabaries, every consonant in the Bengali script can come with what is called an "embedded" or "inherent" vowel sound. For example, the simple letter ? can represent the consonant [
m] in a word like ?? "less". However, in another word, the same letter ? can represent the sequences or , as in ?? "opinion" and ?? "mind", respectively, with no added symbol for the vowels or . If the consonant sound is followed by some other vowel sound in the pronunciation, this can be written by writing a variety of vowel diacritics above, below, before, after, or around the consonant they belong to. Vowels not associated with a consonant are written with separate symbols. To emphatically indicate that a consonant is not pronounced with the embedded vowel, an extra diacritic may be added below the consonant. Consonant clusters are typically indicated by ligating two or more consonant symbols.
The Bengali spelling system is based on a much older version of the language, and thus does not take into account some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language. For example, the alphabet has two letters for the sound and three for the sound . Conversely, a number of letters now have more than one pronunciation; the letter ? can represent either the low vowel [æ] or the high-mid vowel [e]. Furthermore, many letters and diacritics have become "silent letters" in the spoken language. The word for "health", for example, is written , but pronounced . With these minor inconsistencies and redundancies, the Bengali script cannot be described as entirely phonemic.
This same script, with a few small modifications, is also used for writing Assamese. Other related languages in the region also make use of the Bengali alphabet. Meithei , a
Sino-Tibetan language used in the Indian state of
Manipur, is written in the Bengali alphasyllabary for centuries now, though Meetei-Mayek has been promoted in recent times. For centuries, the Sylheti language used a different script, based on the Devanagari alphasyllabary. This script, called Sylheti Nagori, has now fallen out of use, as most speakers of Sylheti have adopted the Bengali script.
Sounds
The phonemic inventory of Bengali consists of 29 consonants and 14 vowels, including the seven nasalized vowels. An approximate phonetic scheme is set out below in
IPA.
|
Consonants| | Labial | Dental | Apico-
Alveolar | Apico-
Postalveolar | Lamino-
Postalveolar | Velar | Glottal |
Voiceless
stops | | | | | | | | Voiced
stops | | | | | | | | Voiceless
fricatives | | | | | | | | Nasals | | | | | | | | Liquids | | | | | | | | |
|}
Romanization
Several conventions exist for writing Indic languages including Bengali in the Latin script, including IAST , ITRANS , and the National Library at Calcutta romanization.
In the context of Bengali Romanization, it is important to distinguish between
transliteration from transcription. Transliteration is orthographically accurate
, whereas
transcription is phonetically accurate .
Since English does not have the sounds of Bengali, and since pronunciation does not completely reflect the spellings, being faithful to both is not possible.
Bengali words are currently Romanized on Wikipedia using a phonemic transcription, where the pronunciation is represented with no reference to the spelling. The Wikipedia Romanization is given in the table below, with
IPA transcriptions as used above.
|
Consonants| | Labial | Dental | Apico-
Alveolar | Apico-
Postalveolar | Lamino-
Postalveolar | Velar | Glottal |
Voiceless
stops | p
f | t
th | | t
th | ch
chh | k
kh | | Voiced
stops | b
bh | d
dh | | d
dh | j
jh | g
gh | | Voiceless
fricatives | | | s | | sh | | h | Nasals | m | | n | | | ng | | Liquids | | | l, r | r | | | |
|}
Bengali, like most Indo-Aryan languages, has an Abugida orthography, i.e. a vowel is inherent in every non-conjunct consonant - either ?
ô or ?
o , although many instances exhibit schwa-deletion .
Because of this ambiguity in the spelling system, the transliteration and transcription of a Bengali word can differ. A word like ????? is correctly transliterated as gamala and transcribed
gamla [gamla]. Transcription models would confuse homophonous words such as ??? and ??? , which are both pronounced
shap .
Romanization Choices| | transcription
| transcription
| transliteration
| transliteration
|
??? | | shap | sApa | sapa | ??? | | shap | shApa | sapa | ????? | | gamla | gAmalA | gamala | ??/?? | | boi | bai | bai |
On the other hand, correct transliterations are hard to pronounce for those who do not already speak Bengali, as the graphemic transliteration of Bengali can be misleading with respect to pronunciation.
Two standards are commonly used for transliteration of Indic languages including Bengali. The older diacritic approach, or ITRANS, is a transliteration scheme that uses upper- and lower-case letters contrastively and is more suited for
ASCII-derivative keyboards. IAST uses diacritics instead of contrastive upper-case letters. Diphthongs remain a serious problem for most transliteration schemes, as in the distinction between ?? from ??; this is not resolved in standard IAST or ITRANS transliterations also.
Diphthongs
Diphthongs| IPA | Transliteration | Example |
| ii | nii "I take" | | iu | biubhôl "upset" | | ei | nei "there is not" | | ee | khee "having eaten" | | eu | dheu "wave" | | eo | kheona "do not eat" | | êe | nêe "she takes" | | êo | nêo "you take" | | ai | pai "I find" | | ae | pae "she finds" | | au | pau "sliced bread" | | ao | pao "you find" | | ôe | nôe "she is not" | | ôo | nôo "you are not" | | oi | noi "I am not" | | oe | dhoe "she washes" | | oo | dhoo "you wash" | | ou | nouka "boat" | | ui | dhui "I wash" |
Magadhan languages such as Bengali are known for their wide variety of diphthongs, or combinations of
vowels occurring within the same
syllable. Several vowel combinations can be considered true monosyllabic diphthongs, made up of the main vowel and the trailing vowel . Almost all other vowel combinations are possible, but only across two adjacent syllables, such as the disyllabic vowel combination in
kua "well". As many as 25 vowel combinations can be found, but some of the more recent combinations have not passed through the stage between two syllables and a diphthongal monosyllable.
Stress
In standard Bengali, stress is predominantly initial. Bengali words are virtually all trochaic; the primary stress falls on the initial
syllable of the word, while secondary stress often falls on all odd-numbered syllables thereafter, giving strings such as [
shô-ho-
jo-gi-
ta] "cooperation", where the
boldface represents primary and secondary stress. The first syllable carries the greatest stress, with the third carrying a somewhat weaker stress, and all following odd-numbered syllables carrying very weak stress. However, in words borrowed from Sanskrit, the root syllable has stress, out of harmony with the situation with native Bengali words.
Adding prefixes to a word typically shifts the stress to the left; for example, while the word [
shob-bho] "civilized" carries the primary stress on the first syllable [
shob], adding the negative prefix [ô-] creates [
ô-shob-bho] "uncivilized", where the primary stress is now on the newly-added first syllable [
ô]. In any case, Word-stress does not alter the meaning of a word, and is always subsidiary to sentence-stress.
Intonation
For Bengali words, intonation or pitch of voice have minor significance, apart from a few isolated cases. However in sentences intonation does play a significant role. In a simple declarative sentence, most words and/or phrases in Bengali carry a rising tone, with the exception of the last word in the sentence, which only carries a low tone. This intonational pattern creates a musical tone to the typical Bengali sentence, with low and high tones alternating until the final drop in pitch to mark the end of the sentence.
In sentences involving focused words and/or phrases, the rising tones only last until the focused word; all following words carry a low tone. This intonation pattern extends to wh-questions, as wh-words are normally considered to be focused. In yes-no questions, the rising tones may be more exaggerated, and most importantly, the final syllable of the final word in the sentence takes a high falling tone instead of a flat low tone.
Vowel length
Vowel length is not contrastive in Bengali; all else equal, there is no meaningful distinction between a "short vowel" and a "long vowel", unlike the situation in many other Indic languages. However, when morpheme boundaries come into play, vowel length can sometimes distinguish otherwise homophonous words. This is due to the fact that
open monosyllables have somewhat longer vowels than other syllable types. For example, the vowel in
cha: "tea" is somewhat longer than the first vowel in
chata "licking", as
cha: is a word with only one syllable, and no final consonant. The suffix
ta "the" can be added to
cha: to form
cha:ta "the tea". Even when another morpheme is attached to
cha:, the long vowel is preserved. Knowing this fact, some interesting cases of apparent vowel length distinction can be found. In general Bengali vowels tend to stay away from extreme vowel articulation.
Furthermore, using a form of reduplication called "echo reduplication", the long vowel in
cha: can be copied into the reduplicant
ta:, giving
cha:ta: "tea and all that comes with it". Thus, in addition to
cha:ta "the tea" and
chata "licking" , we have
cha:ta: "tea and all that comes with it" .
Consonant clusters
Native Bengali words allow only very restricted initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC . Many speakers of Bengali restrict their phonology to this pattern, even when using Sanskrit or English borrowings, such as
geram for
gram "village" or
iskul for
skul "school".
Sanskrit words borrowed into Bengali, however, possess a wide range of clusters, expanding the maximum syllable structure to CCCVC. Some of these clusters, such as the
mr in
mrittu "death" or the
sp in
spôshto "clear", have become extremely common, and can be considered legal consonant clusters in Bengali. Other commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include
pr ,
br ,
bhr ,
tr ,
dr ,
kr ,
gr ,
sr ,
str ,
sth , and
sn .
Less commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include
dhr ,
ghr ,
ml ,
nr ,
sf ,
st , and
skh .
English and other foreign borrowings add even more cluster types into the Bengali inventory, further increasing the syllable capacity to CCCVCCCC, as commonly-used loanwords such as
tren "train" and
glash "glass" are now even included in leading Bengali dictionaries. Clusters from English borrowings include
bl ,
thr ,
tr ,
dr ,
fr ,
fl ,
spl ,
st ,
str ,
skr , and
sm . Furthermore, some clusters occasionally found in Sanskrit borrowings are now more commonly heard in English borrowings. These clusters include
pl ,
kl ,
gl ,
sl ,
spr , and
sk .
Final consonant clusters are rare in Bengali. Most final consonant clusters were borrowed into Bengali from English, as in
lift "lift, elevator" and
bênk "bank". However, final clusters do exist in some native Bengali words, although rarely in standard pronunciation. One example of a final cluster in a standard Bengali word would be
gônj, which is found in names of hundreds of cities and towns across Bengal, including
Nôbabgônj and
Manikgônj. Some nonstandard varieties of Bengali make use of final clusters quite often. For example, in some Purbo dialects, final consonant clusters consisting of a nasal and its corresponding oral stop are common, as in
chand "moon". The Standard Bengali equivalent of
chand would be
chñad, with a nasalized vowel instead of the final cluster.
Grammar
Bengali nouns are not assigned gender, which leads to minimal changing of adjectives . However, nouns and pronouns are highly declined into four cases while verbs are heavily conjugated.
As a consequence, unlike Hindi, Bengali verbs do not change form depending on the gender of the nouns.
Word order
As a Head-Final language, Bengali follows Subject Object Verb word order, although variations to this theme are highly common. Bengali makes use of postpositions, as opposed to the prepositions used in English and other European languages. Determiners follow the noun, while numerals, adjectives, and possessors precede the noun.
Yes-no questions do not require any change to the basic word order; instead, the low tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling tone. Additionally optional particles are often encliticized onto the first or last word of a yes-no question.
Wh-questions are formed by fronting the wh-word to focus position, which is typically the first or second word in the utterance.
Nouns
Nouns and pronouns are inflected for case, including nominative, objective, genitive , and locative. The case marking pattern for each noun being inflected depends on the noun's degree of animacy. When a definite article such as
-ta or
-gula is added, as in the tables below, nouns are also inflected for number.
|
Plural Noun Inflection
| Animate | Inanimate |
|---|
| Nominative | chhatro-ra
the students | juta-gula
the shoes |
|---|
| Objective | chhatro-der
the students | juta-gula
the shoes |
|---|
| Genitive | chhatro-der
the students' | juta-gula-r
the shoes' |
|---|
| Locative | - | juta-gula-te
on/in the shoes |
|---|
|}
When counted, nouns take one of a small set of measure words. As in many Asian languages , nouns in Bengali cannot be counted by adding the numeral directly adjacent to the noun. The noun's measure word must be used between the numeral and the noun. Most nouns take the generic measure word
ta, though other measure words indicate semantic classes .
Measure Words
| Bengali | Literal translation | English translation |
|---|
| Nôe-ta goru | Nine-MW cow | Nine cows |
| Kôe-ta balish | How many-MW pillow | How many pillows |
| Ônek-jon lok | Many-MW person | Many people |
| Char-pañch-jon shikkhôk | Four-five-MW teacher | Four or five teachers |
Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words would typically be considered ungrammatical. However, omitting the noun and preserving the measure word is commonly encountered: e.g.
Shudhu êk-jon thakbe. would be understood to mean "Only one
person will remain.", given the semantic class implicit in
jon.
In this sense, all nouns in Bengali, unlike most other Indo-European languages, are similar to mass nouns.
Verbs
Verbs divide into two classes: finite and non-finite. Non-finite verbs have no inflection for tense or person, while finite verbs are fully inflected for person , tense , aspect , and honor , but
not for number. Conditional, imperative, and other special inflections for mood can replace the tense and aspect suffixes. The number of inflections on many verb roots can total more than 200.
Inflectional suffixes in the morphology of Bengali vary from region to region, along with minor differences in syntax.
An aspect in which Bengali differs from most Indo-Aryan Languages is the zero copula, where the copula or connective
be is often missing in the present tense. Thus "he is a teacher" is
she shikkhôk, .
In this respect, Bengali is similar to
Russian or
Hungarian).
Vocabulary
Bengali may have as many as 75,000 separate words, of which 50,000 are considered
tôtshôm , 21,100 are
tôdbhôb , and the rest being
bideshi and
deshi words.
However, these figures do not take into account the fact that a large proportion of these words are archaic or highly technical, minimizing their actual usage. The productive vocabulary used in modern literary works, in fact, is made up mostly of tôdbhôb words, while tôtshôm only make up 25% of the total. Deshi and bideshi words together make up the remaining 8% of the vocabulary used in modern Bengali literature.
Due to centuries of contact with
Europeans,
Mughals, Arabs,
Persians, and
East Asians, Bengali has absorbed countless words from foreign languages, often totally integrating these borrowings into the core vocabulary. The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three different kinds of contact. Close contact with neighboring peoples facilitated the borrowing of words from
Hindi, Assamese,
Chinese,
Burmese, and several indigenous
Austroasiatic languages of Bengal. After centuries of invasions from
Persia and the
Middle East, numerous
Turkish,
Arabic, and
Persian words were absorbed and fully integrated into the lexicon. Later, European colonialism brought words from
Portuguese,
French,
Dutch, and most significantly
English.
Phonological variations
There are marked dialectal differences between the speech of Bengalis living on the
Poshchim side and
Purbo side of the
Padma River.
Fricatives
In the dialects prevalent in much of eastern Bangladesh , many of the stops and affricates heard in Kolkata Bengali are pronounced as fricatives.
Poshchim Bangla
palato-alveolar affricates , ? [], and ? [] correspond to Purbo Bangla . A similar pronunciation is also found in Assamese, a related language across the border in India.
The aspirated velar stop ? [] and the aspirated labial stop ? [] of Poshchim Bangla correspond to ?? [x] and ?? [f] in many dialects of Purbo Bangla. These pronunciations are most extreme in the Sylheti dialect of far northeastern Bangladesh -- the dialect of Bengali most common in the
United Kingdom. Sylheti is also considered by some to be a separate language.
Many Purbo Bangla dialects share phonological features with Assamese, including the debuccalization of ? [] to ? [h] or ?? [x].
Tibeto-Burman influence
The influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Purbo Bangla is seen through the lack of nasalized vowels, a more fronted place of articulation for the apico-postalveolar stops ? [], ? [], ? [], and ? [], and the lack of distinction between ? [] and ??/?? [].
Unlike most Indic languages, some Purbo Bangla dialects do not include the breathy voiced stops ? [], ? [], ? [], ? [], and ? [].
Some variants of Bengali, particularly Chittagonian and Chakma Bengali , have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker's voice can distinguish words.
Lexical variations
The third major factor in dialectical difference, specifically between the dialects of West Bengal and Bangladesh, is a lexical one. Even in Standard Bengali, vocabulary items often divide along the split between the predominantly Muslim Bangladeshi populace and largely Hindu West Bengali populace. Due to their cultural and religious traditions, Muslims occasionally utilize Perso-Arabic words instead of the Sanskrit-derived forms.
Some examples of lexical alternation between standard West Bengali forms and their corresponding standard Bangladeshi forms are as follows:
- hello: nômoshkar corresponds to assalamualaikum/slamalikum
- invitation: nimontron/nimontonno corresponds to daoat
- guest: otithi corresponds to mehman
- sir: môshae corresponds to shaheb
- bath/shower: snan/chan corresponds to gosol
- water: jôl corresponds to pani
- meat: mangsho corresponds to gosh/goshto/gosto
- prayer: prarthona corresponds to doa
- God: Bhôgoban, Ishshor corresponds to Allah , Khoda
- mother: ma corresponds to amma
- father: baba corresponds to abba
- maternal aunt: mashi corresponds to khala
- paternal aunt: pishi corresponds to fupi/fupu
- paternal uncle: kaka corresponds to chacha
The differences above depend on the region contemplated and are not always clearly distinct. For example, many people in West Bengal continue to use the words
chan and
gosol interchangeably with no particular bias towards one word or the other; a similar situation prevails in Hindu majority and Western regions of Bangladesh. Additionally,
baba and
ma are also heard often in Bangladesh.
Though
jôl,
pani,
kaka, and
chacha are all Sanskrit derivatives,
pani and
chacha became more associated with the
Hindustani language that imbibed so much of
Mughal culture and so became the word of choice for Muslim speakers of Bengali.
Furthermore, there are cases where speakers of Standard Bengali in West Bengal will use a different word than a speaker of Standard Bengali in Bangladesh, even though both words are of native Bengali descent. Because each pair of words is made up of only native vocabulary, the choice of which word to use is not based on one's religion, but on regional usage. Examples of such cases are listed below, with the West Bengali standard marked and the Bangladeshi standard marked :
- salt: nun corresponds to lôbon
- chili pepper: lôngka corresponds to morich
- with: shôngge corresponds to shathe
- house/home: bari corresponds to basha
In both India and Bangladesh, the words
bari and
basha can refer to slightly different meanings;
bari is often translated to mean "house" or "building", while
basha is often translated to mean "residence". Still, for the basic meaning of "home", Bengalis tend to use
bari in India and
basha in Bangladesh.
Note that these differences reflect the vocabulary of the standard varieties of Bengali in West Bengali and Bangladesh. Variation in the vocabulary of the countless regional dialects of both West Bengal and Bangladesh are even more pronounced.
See also
...
- Music of Bangladesh
- Music of Bengal
- Bengali cinema
- List of national languages of India
- List of Indian languages by total speakers
- Bengali people
- Bengali literature
External links
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- Transliterate online from Romanised to Unicode Bengali
- . Requires unicode enabled browser .
Notes
References
