Bengali language

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: Huq, Daniul, Article on Chalita Bhasa, Banglapedia Huq, Daniul, Article on Shadhu Bhasa, Banglapedia# Shadhubhasha is the written language with longer verb inflections and a more Sanskrit-derived (tôtshôm) vocabulary (shadhu = 'chaste' or 'sage'; bhasha = 'language'). Songs such as India's national anthem Jana Gana Mana (by Rabindranath Tagore) and national song Vande Mātaram (by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay) 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 (cholito = 'current' or 'running'). This form came into vogue towards the turn of the 19th century, in an orthography promoted in the writings of Peary Chand Mitra (Alaler ghare dulal, 1857),Alaler Ghorer Dulal in Pramatha Chowdhury (Sabujpatra, 1914) 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". Morshed, Abul Kalam Manjoor, Article on Bengali dialects, Banglapedia

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 ("regional Bengali"). 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 ("rural Bengali"), 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 (vocabulary) 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 (or West-Central), Northern, Bahe, Eastern, Ganda, and Vanga, but this list isvery fluid.See the Ethnologue report

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. ChittagonianSee the Ethnologue report 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 (also called syllabic alphabet or abugida), 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 ম can represent the consonant [m] in a word like কম "less". However, in another word, the same letter ম can represent the sequences or , as in মত "opinion" and মন "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 (for example, vowels at the beginning of a word) 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 এ 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 (Manipuri), a Sino-Tibetan language used in the Indian state of Manipur, is written in the Bengali alphasyllabary for centuries now, though Meetei-Mayek (the Meithei alphasyllabary) 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,Sylheti Nagri on 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.

Vowels

	Central	Back
High
High-mid
Low-mid
Low	|

Consonants

	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 (based on diacritics), ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards), 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(i.e. the original spelling can be recovered), whereas transcription is phonetically accurate (the pronunciationcan be reproduced). 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.

Vowels

	Central	Back
High	i		u
High-mid	e		o
Low-mid	ê		ô
Low		a

Consonants

	Dental	Apico- Alveolar	Apico- Postalveolar	Lamino- Postalveolar	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless stops	p f	t th		ţ ţh	ch chh	k kh
Voiced stops	b bh	d dh		đ đh	j jh	g gh
Voiceless fricatives			s		sh		h
Nasals	m		n			ng
Liquids			l, r	ŗ

|}

Bengali, like most Indo-Aryan languages, has an Abugida orthography, i.e. a vowel is inherent in every non-conjunct consonant - either অ ô (e.g. ম in মরা môra) or �" o (e.g. ম in মরি mori), although many instances exhibit schwa-deletion (e.g. ম in গামলা gamla).

Because of this ambiguity in the spelling system, the transliteration and transcription of a Bengali word can differ. A word like গামলা is correctly transliterated as gāmalā (gāmlā would correspond to the orthography গাম্লা) and transcribed gamla [gamla]. Transcription models would confuse homophonous words such as সাপ (sāpa) and শাপ (śāpa), which are both pronounced shap .

Romanization Choices

	transcription (in IPA)	transcription (on Wikipedia)	transliteration (ITRANS)	transliteration (diacritics)
সাপ	shap	sApa	sāpa
শাপ	shap	shApa	śāpa
গামলা	gamla	gAmalA	gāmalā
বই/বৈ	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 বই from বৈ; this is not resolved in standard IAST or ITRANS transliterations also.

Diphthongs

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 (the nucleus) and the trailing vowel (the off-glide). Almost other vowel combinations are possible, but only across two adjacent syllables, such as the disyllabic vowel combination [u.a] in kua "well". As many as 25 diphthongs can be found, but some of the more recent combinations have not passed through the stage between two syllables and a diphthongal monosyllable.

Monosyllabic Diphthongs

IPA¦¦Off-glide IPA>	Transliteration	Example
[]	[]	ii	nii "I take"
[]	[]	iu	biubhôl "upset"
[]	[]	ei	nei "there is not"
[]	[]	ee	khee "having eaten"
[]	[]	eu	đheu "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"

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 (i.e. words that are made up of only one syllable, with that syllable ending in the main vowel and not a consonant) have somewhat longer vowels than other syllable types. For example, the vowel in cha: "tea" is somewhat longer than the first vowel in chaţa "licking", as cha: is a word with only one syllable, and no final consonant. (The long vowel is marked with a colon : in these examples.) The suffix ţa "the" can be added to cha: to form cha:ţa "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 ţa:, giving cha:ţa: "tea and all that comes with it". Thus, in addition to cha:ţa "the tea" (long first vowel) and chaţa "licking" (no long vowels), we have cha:ţa: "tea and all that comes with it" (both long vowels).

Consonant clusters

Native Bengali (tôdbhôb) words allow only very restricted initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC (i.e. one vowel flanked by a consonant on each side). Many speakers of Bengali restrict their phonology to this pattern, even when using Sanskrit or English borrowings, such as geram (CV.CVC) for gram (CCVC) "village" or iskul (VC.CVC) for skul (CCVC) "school".

Sanskrit (tôtshôm) 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 spôshţo "clear", have become extremely common, and can be considered legal consonant clusters in Bengali. Other commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include pr (proshno "question"), br (brishţi "rain"), bhr (bhromon "travel"), tr (trish "thirty"), dr (druto "rapid"), kr (krimi "worm"), gr (gram "village"), sr (sromik "worker"), str (stri "woman"), sth (sthanio "local"), and sn (snan "bath").

Less commonly-heard clusters from Sanskrit include dhr (dhrubo "fixed, permanent"), ghr (ghrina "disgust"), ml (mlan "melancholy"), nr (nritto "dance"), sf (sfurti "delight"), st (stômbho "tower"), and skh (skhôlon "slip").

English and other foreign (bideshi) borrowings add even more cluster types into the Bengali inventory, further increasing the syllable capacity to CCCVCCCC, as commonly-used loanwords such as ţren "train" and glash "glass" are now even included in leading Bengali dictionaries. Clusters from English borrowings include bl (blauz "blouse"), thr (thru or thrute "through, via"), ţr (ţrak "truck"), đr (đraivar "driver"), fr (frans "France"), fl (flaiţ "flight"), spl (splêsh "splash"), sţ (sţeshon "station"), sţr (sţreiţ "straight"), skr (skru "screw"), and sm (smarţ "smart"). Furthermore, some clusters occasionally found in Sanskrit borrowings are now more commonly heard in English borrowings. These clusters include pl (plen "plane"), kl (klash "class"), gl (glash "glass"), sl (sloli "slowly"), spr (spring "spring"), and sk (skarţ "skirt").

Final consonant clusters are rare in Bengali. Most final consonant clusters were borrowed into Bengali from English, as in lifţ "lift, elevator" and bêņk "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 (eastern) 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 (called inflection). However, nouns and pronouns are highly declined (altered depending on their function in a sentence) 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 (L) tone of the final syllable in the utterance is replaced with a falling (HL) tone. Additionally optional particles (e.g. [-ki], [-na], etc.) 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 (possessive), 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 -ţa (singular) or -gula (plural) is added, as in the tables below, nouns are also inflected for number.

Singular Noun Inflection

	Animate! Inanimate
Nominative	chhatro-ţa the student	juta-ţa the shoe
Objective	chhatro-ţa-ke the student	juta-ţa the shoe
Genitive	chhatro-ţa-r the student's	juta-ţa-r the shoe's
Locative	-	juta-ţa-(t)eon/in the shoe

Plural Noun Inflection

	Animate! Inanimate
Nominative	chhatro-ra the students	juta-gula the shoes
Objective	chhatro-der(ke) the students	juta-gula the shoes
Genitive	chhatro-der the students'	juta-gula-r the shoes'
Locative	-	juta-gula-te on/in the shoes