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The 3rd article of the Constitution of Bangladesh states Bengali to be the sole official language of Bangladesh. Bengali is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand, and sizeable minorities of Bengali speakers reside in Indian cities outside Bengal, including Delhi, Mumbai, Thane, Varanasi, and Vrindavan. Besides the native region it is also spoken by the Bengalis living in Tripura, southern Assam and the Bengali population in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In 2024, the government of India conferred Bengali with the status of classical language. However, in 2022, the UN did adopt Bangla as an unofficial language, after a resolution tabled by India.

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Two of these, /oi̯/ and /ou̯/, are the only ones with representation in script, as ঐ and ঔ respectively. Bengali is known for its wide variety of diphthongs, combinations of vowels occurring within the same syllable. The majority of Bengalis are able to communicate in more than one variety – often, speakers are fluent in Cholitobhasha (SCB) and one or more regional dialects. Some dialects, particularly those of the Chittagong region, bear only a superficial resemblance to SCB. However, a majority in Bangladesh speaks dialects notably different from SCB.

Bengali Vowels (স্বরবর্ণ – Shororborno) – 11 Essential Sounds

Published under the imprint of Benglish Books, these are based on phonetic transliteration and closely follow spellings used in social media but for using an underline to describe soft consonants. As the spelling often doesn’t reflect the actual pronunciation, transliteration and transcription are often different. Transliteration is orthographically accurate (i.e. the original spelling can be recovered), whereas transcription is phonetically accurate (the pronunciation can be reproduced). So when these Sanskrit words re-entered the Bengali vocabulary as tatsam words, their pronunciations were modified, but their spellings were retained.

That is why most of the tatsam words are pronounced way different from what they are written or spelt. Bengali has lots of tatsam words (words directly derived from Sanskrit) and in all these words, the original spelling has been preserved but the pronunciations have changed due to consonant mergers and sound shifts. The main reason for these numerous inconsistencies is that there have been lots of sound mergers in Bengali, but the script has failed to account for the sound shifts and banglabet bet consonant mergers in the language. Thus, same letters and graphemes can often have different pronunciations depending on their position in a word and different graphemes and letters often have the same pronunciation. Some consonant clusters have completely different pronunciation as compared to the constituent consonants. In most of the consonant clusters, only the first consonant is pronounced and rest of the consonants are silent.

The same হ্য is pronounced as ‘hæ’ as in হ্যাঁ (meaning “yes”) (written as hyām̐ but pronounced as nasalised “hæ”). For example, ‘হ্য’ as in ঐতিহ্য (meaning “heritage”) where hy is pronounced as jjh (written as aitihya but pronounced as ōitijjhō). Examples are লক্ষ্মণ (written as lakṣmaṇa but pronounced as lokkhōn “Lakshman”), বিশ্বাস (written as biśbāsa but pronounced as biśśaś “belief”), বাধ্য (written as bādhya but pronounced as baddhō “obliged”) and স্বাস্থ্য (written as sbāsthya but pronounced as śasthō “health”).

Other related languages in the nearby region also make use of the Bengali script like the Meitei language in the Indian state of Manipur, where the Meitei language has been written in the Bengali script for centuries, though the Meitei script has been promoted in recent times. For example, the combination of the consonants ক্ k and ষ ʂ is graphically realised as ক্ষ and is pronounced kkʰo (as in রুক্ষ rukkʰo “coarse”), kʰɔ (as in ক্ষমতা kʰɔmota “capability”) or even kʰo (as in ক্ষতি kʰoti “harm”), depending on the position of the cluster in a word. The inherent vowel attached to every consonant can be either ɔ or o depending on vowel harmony (স্বরসঙ্গতি) with the preceding or following vowel or on the context, but this phonological information is not captured by the script, creating ambiguity for the reader. In general, the Bengali-Assamese script is fairly transparent for grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, i.e., it is easier to predict the pronunciation from spelling of the words, though there are many cases where pronunciation is different from what is written. It is a cursive script with eleven graphemes or signs denoting nine vowels and two diphthongs, and thirty-nine graphemes representing consonants and other modifiers.

Romani grammar is also closer to Bengali grammar than to that of western Indo-Aryan languages. Some of them are the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, or IAST system (based on diacritics); “Indian languages Transliteration”, or ITRANS (uses upper case letters suited for ASCII keyboards); and the National Library at Kolkata romanisation. The script is known as the Bengali alphabet for Bengali and its dialects and the Assamese alphabet for Assamese language with some minor variations. The script used for Bengali, Assamese, and other languages is known as Bengali script. Almost all the cases of silent letters existing in Bengali are found in the tatsam words.The Bengali writing system, therefore, is often not a true guide for pronunciation.

• The letters run from left to right and spaces are used to separate orthographic words.
• Unlike in Western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) where the letter forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা matra.
• Practice writing and pronouncing each consonant for fluency.
• The phonemic inventory of standard Bengali consists of 29 consonants and 7 vowels, as well as 7 nasalised vowels.

Bengali follows Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order, similar to Hindi and unlike English which follows Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). Perfect starting point for Bengali language learners. Master these common Bengali words used in everyday conversations. These essential expressions form the foundation of Bengali conversation and daily communication. Begin your Bengali journey with these fundamental words and phrases.