Bangla

Bangla, also known as Bengali, is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Bengali people in South Asia. It is the official and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh, where it is used in government, education, media, and daily life, and is one of the major regional languages of the Indian state of West Bengal. It is also spoken in the Indian states of Tripura and parts of Assam, as well as by diaspora communities around the world. Estimates place the number of native speakers at around 230 million, with total speakers surpassing 300 million.

Bangla belongs to the Indo-European language family, within the Indo-Aryan branch, in the Bengali–Assamese subgroup of the eastern languages. It is written in the Bengali script, an abugida derived from the Brahmi script. The script is used for several other languages of the region and features a distinct round-letter style with diacritics to indicate vowels and certain consonant modifications.

Standard Bengali, known as Shadhu Bhasha in its literary form, is based on the speech of the eastern dialects and serves as the basis for formal writing and education; numerous regional dialects exist. Some, such as Sylheti and Chittagonian, are sometimes regarded as separate languages by linguists, though they share a writing system and vocabulary with Bengali.

Bangla has a rich literary tradition dating to medieval poetry and prose, with a modern canon that includes Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and other figures such as Kazi Nazrul Islam and Michael Madhusudan Datta. The Bengali Language Movement of 1952 in what was then East Pakistan was a pivotal milestone for recognizing Bangla as an official language and contributed to the eventual independence of Bangladesh.