Bengali language facts for kids
Quick facts for kids Bengali |
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| Bangla বাংলা |
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"Bangla" in Bengali script
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| Region | Bangladesh and India | |||
| Ethnicity | Bengalis | |||
| Native speakers | 250–300 million (2017) (L1 plus L2 speakers) |
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| Language family |
Indo-European
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| Early forms: |
Abahattha
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| Dialects |
see Bengali dialects
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| Writing system | Eastern Nagari script (Bengali alphabet) Bengali Braille |
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| Official status | ||||
| Official language in |  Bangladesh India (in West Bengal, Tripura and Barak Valley) |
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| Regulated by | Bangla Academy Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi |
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| Linguasphere | 59-AAF-u |
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Bengali speaking region of South Asia
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Bengali is the most eastern Indo-Aryan language from South Asia. It developed from a language called Pali.
Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura.
There are about 220 million native speakers and about 250 million total speakers of Bengali. It is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, ranking seventh.
Almost all of the people in Bangladesh speak Bengali, and many famous books and poems are written in Bengali. Rabindranath Tagore was a famous poet who wrote in Bengali. Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh were written in this language.
Images for kids
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Present-day distribution of Indo-European languages in Eurasia. Bengali belongs to easternmost spoken Indo-European language family
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Indo- Iranian language family, Bengali marked yellow
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The descent of proto-Gauda, the ancestor of the modern Bengali language, from the proto-Gauda-Kamarupa line of the proto-Magadhan(Magadhi Prakrit).
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Silver coin with proto-Bengali script, Harikela Kingdom, circa 9th–13th century
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An example of handwritten Bengali. Part of a poem written in Bengali (and with its English translation below each Bengali paragraph) by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore in 1926 in Hungary
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An 1855 Dobhashi manuscript of Halat-un-Nabi written by Sadeq Ali using the Sylheti Nagri script.
See also
In Spanish: Idioma bengalí para niños
