It was, and still is, regarded as a literary language, with some of the best literature from India written in Bengali. They have had a great influence as well on the most well-known Indian film industry, Bollywood, as well as the film industry in general.īengali may seem like just a regular language, but as you can see it has a lot of importance and history in many countries, including India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Bangla had its origin in the 10th century CE, deriving from Magahi Prakrit (a spoken language) through Magahi Apabhramsha (its written counterpart). Many of the films that have come out of Tollywood have been nationally and internationally acclaimed, some even winning awards. Bangla is the official language of the India states of West Bengal, Tripura and Assam and sole official language of Bangladesh. Tollywood is based in Tollygunge in West Bengal, thus the name that combines “Hollywood” with Tollygunge. In fact, the name “Bollywood” was inspired by Tollywood. Tollywood dates back to the 1890s, way before Bollywood came into existence. Something very interesting about Bengali is that there is an entire film industry, nicknamed “Tollywood”, that makes films in Bengali. Not everyone agrees with this way of organizing the Bengali dialects, but it seems to be the most common way of doing so. Besides that, the dialects of Bengali tend to be organized into four different groups: Varendra, Banga, Rarh, and Kamarupa. Bengali is classified by linguists as a dialect continuum, just like Hindi. Besides the national anthem of India, the Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi national anthems were all composed in Bengali originally.Ī dialect continuum is a group of dialects that form a spectrum, with dialects on either end of the spectrum that are so different that they are no longer mutually intelligible. The lyrics were later translated into Hindi-Urdu by Abid Ali.
Along with that status, the national anthem of India, “Jana Gana Mana,” was actually originally written in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel prize winning Bengali writer, poet, and composer. Though it may not be one of the official languages of India, Bengali is recognized as a regional official language in some Indian states. The Language of the Indian National Anthem About 250 million people speak Bengali as their native language, putting it in seventh place for the most spoken language in the world in terms of number of native speakers. One of those languages, which comes in at second place in terms of number of speakers, is Bengali.īengali is the official language of Bangladesh and is native to the Bengal region, which is made up of Bangladesh as well as the Indian states of Tripura, West Bengal, and the southern region of Assam. Hindi may be the official language of India along with English, but there are large chunks of the population that speak languages that aren’t even part of the Hindi dialect continuum. However, India is a land of a thousand languages, or at least over 120. ০.১.৮.For foreigners and others not too familiar with the country of India, the Hindi language is maybe the only one that comes to mind when thinking about what languages the people of India speak.Dialects of Bengali and Their Differences The Bengali-to-Latin transliteration scheme is the one followed in the English Wikipedia and can be seen here. A phonetic transliteration using the IPA, as well as recorded audio samples are also being used. The examples of Bengali words, phrases, clauses and sentences used in this book are generally presented simultaneously in three written forms: one using the Bengali script, a transliterated version using Latin letters, and an English translation. The language has a rich literary heritage and underwent a renaissance in the late 19th century. After Hindi, Bengali is the second most spoken language in the Indian subcontinent, and among the top 10 most spoken languages in the world. Bengali, or Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken predominantly in Bangladesh and in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura by approximately 200 million people.