Bengali has no concept of masculine, feminine, or neuter nouns, so you won’t have to worry about this issue. Many English speakers trip over the concept of noun genders when studying languages such as French, Spanish, or German. Even though the words appear jumbled up at first glance, you can still use logic and context to make sense of them.īengali, although different from English in many ways, also has the advantage of being a largely genderless language. For example, to use Bengali-style word order in English, we’d say something like, “We this sentence understand not.” While this seems very odd at first, you can still figure out the meaning because you know all the words in the sentence. In addition, verb negations go after the verb in Bengali. In English, verbs are usually somewhere in the middle-following the subject, and before the object. Bengali places its verbs either at or near the end of sentences. Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute, Bengali is considered a Class III language…meaning that it has “significant linguistic and/or cultural differences from English.” How to Learn BengaliĪccording to the U.S. These immigrants, part of the Bangladeshi diaspora, live in countries as diverse as Malaysia and Germany, Saudi Arabia and the United States. There are over 6.5 million Bangladeshis living outside of the Indian subcontinent. Outside of India and Bangladesh, Bengali is spoken by immigrant populations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.

Bengali speakers can revert to a more formal, neutrally-accented register of the language to be better understood by speakers from other regions. The Bengali of West Bengal is called “Western” Bengali as it’s spoken in Bangladesh is the “Eastern” standard.Īside from variations in spelling and diction, pronunciation differences clearly distinguish the two forms. There are some dialectical differences between the Bengali of India and that of Bangladesh. Hindi and English-India’s two official languages-dominate in that city. Even so, only a little over half Kolkata’s population speaks Bengali. Bengali plays an important role in Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal. India’s national anthem, “ Jana Gana Mana,” was originally written in Bengali.Ībout 85% of the people in West Bengal speak Bengali. Among state-recognized regional languages in India, only Hindi has more speakers than Bengali. In India, it’s also spoken in the West Bengal state, as well as the states of Tripura and Assam. Known to its native speakers as Bangla, it’s the only national and official language of Bangladesh, where ethnic Bengali peoples comprise 98% of the population. Bengali ranks among the top ten most spoken languages in the world.

Bengali language alphabet