The descent of proto-Gauda, the ancestor of the modern Bengali language, from the proto-Gauda-Kamarupa line of the proto-Magadhan(Magadhi Prakrit). In 1999, UNESCO recognised 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the language movement. The Bengali language movement from 1948 to 1956 demanding Bengali to be an official language of Pakistan fostered Bengali nationalism in East Bengal leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.

Bengali literature, with its millennium-old literary history, extensively developed during the Bengali Renaissance and is one of the most prolific and diverse literary traditions in Asia. īengali has developed over the course of more than 1,300 years. Bengali is also spoken by the Bengali diasporas ( Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) in Europe, the United States, the Middle East and other countries. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states including Bihar, Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Odisha and Uttarakhand. It is also a second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. Within India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. īengali is the official and national language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using Bengali as their first language.

With approximately 300 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers, Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world. It is the official, national, and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India. Bengali ( / b ɛ n ˈ ɡ ɔː l i/ ben- GAW-lee), also known by its endonym Bangla ( বাংলা, Bengali pronunciation: ), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia.

Old bengali books pdf