Bengali

Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা) is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indian subcontinent, evolved from Magadhi Prakrit and Sanskrit. It is native to the Indian state of West Bengal, Bangladesh, southern Assam, and part of Tripura. Bengali is spoken by approximately 230 million people around the world and is one of the most spoken languages in the world. Bengali is the second most spoken language in India after Hindi. It is also the primary language spoken in Bangladesh.

Bengali is one of the 23 official languages recognised by the Republic of India and the national and official language of Bangladesh. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, and one of the official languages of Assam. It is also a major language in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It was made an official language of Sierra Leone in order to honour the Bangladeshi peacekeeping force from the United Nations stationed there.

Magadhi Prakrit and Maithili, the earliest recorded spoken languages in the region and the language of the Buddha, evolved into Ardhamagadhi ("Half Magadhi") in the early part of the first millennium CE. Ardhamagadhi, as with all of the Prakrits of North India, began to give way to Apabhramsa languages before the turn of the first millennium. The local Apabhramsa language of the eastern subcontinent, Purvi Apabhramsa or Apabhramsa Abahatta, evolved into regional dialects which formed three groups: the Bihari languages, the Oriya languages, and the Bengali-Assamese languages.

The evolution of Bengali usually has three periods: Old Bengali (900/1000–1400), Middle Bengali (1400–1800), and New Bengali (since 1800). Historically closer to Pali, Bengali saw an increase in Sanskrit influence during the Middle Bengali period, and also during the Bengal Renaissance.

In 1951–52, the Bengali Language Movement in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) was started to advocate Bengali as an official language of Pakistan. On February 21, 1952, protesting students and activists were fired upon by military and police in Dhaka University and several people were killed. In 1999, UNESCO declared this day as International Mother Language Day.

The Bengali script is a variant of the Eastern Nagari script used throughout Bangladesh and eastern India (Assam, West Bengal, and the Mithila region of Bihar). The Eastern Nagari script is believed to have evolved from a modified Brahmic script around 1000 CE. It is similar to the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit and many modern Indic languages like Hindi. The Bengali script has a close historical relationship with Assamese, and Mithilakshar (the native script for Maithili language) scripts.

The Bengali script is a cursive script with eleven graphemes or signs denoting the independent form of nine vowels and two diphthongs, and thirty-nine signs denoting the consonants with "inherent" vowels. The letters run from left to right on a horizontal line.

Bengali punctuation marks, apart from the daŗi (|), the Bengali equivalent of a full stop, have been adopted from western scripts.
Bengali 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 is added, nouns are also inflected for number.

When counted, nouns take one of a small set of measure words. As in many East 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.

Measuring nouns in Bengali without their corresponding measure words would typically be considered ungrammatical. However, when the semantic class of the noun is understood from the measure word, the noun is often omitted and only the measure word is used. In this sense, all nouns in Bengali are similar to mass nouns.

Bengali pronouns have different words for first, second, and third person, and also for singular and plural. Bengali pronouns do not differentiate gender. However, Bengali has different third person pronouns for proximity. The first are used for someone who is nearby, the second for those who are a little further away, and the third are usually for those who are not present.

Bengali verbs are highly inflected and are regular with only few exceptions. Verbs are conjugated for tense and person by changing the endings, which are largely the same for all verbs.

Unlike English, Bengali uses postpositions and not prepositions, i.e., the preposition is placed before the object it modifies.

Information: Wikipedia