Indian Languages
India States | India Religions | India Cricket | India Soccer | India Hockey | India Archery | India Tennis | Indian Monuments
Indian Festivals | India History Timeline | Indian Heroes | Indian Wild Life | Live TV Streaming | Bollywood Film Stars
Tamil Film Stars | Malayalam Film Stars | Who is who Kerala

Languages of India

Home

Indian Languages
Bengali
Bodo
Dogri
Gujarati
Hindi
Kannada
Kashmiri
konkani
Maithili
Malayalam
Manipuri
Marathi
Nepali
Oriya
Punjabi
Sanskrit
Sindhi
Tamil
Telugu
Urdu

Bengali

Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from the Magadhi Prakrit, Pa-li and Sanskrit languages.

Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. With nearly 230 million total speakers, Bengali is one of the most spoken languages (ranking 5th or 6th in the world). Bengali is the primary language spoken in Bangladesh and is the second most spoken language in India. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-Iranian languages.

The Bangla language, with its long and rich literary tradition, serves to bind together a culturally diverse region. In 1952, when Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan, this strong sense of identity led to the Bengali Language Movement, in which several people braved bullets and died on February 21. This day has now been declared as the International Mother Language Day.

Like other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, Bangla arose from the eastern Middle Indic languages of the Indian subcontinent. Magadhi Prakrit, the earliest recorded spoken language in the region and the language of the Buddha, had 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 what are called Apabhramsa languages just before the turn of the first millennium. The local Apabhramsa language of the eastern subcontinent, Purvi Apabhramsa or Apabhramsa Abahatta, eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three groups: the Bihari languages, the Oriya languages, and the Bengali-Assamese languages. Some argue for much earlier points of divergence—going back to even 500 CE but the language was not static; different varieties coexisted and authors often wrote in multiple dialects. For example, Magadhi Prakrit is believed to have evolved into Apabhramsa Abahatta around the 6th century which competed with Bengali for a period of time.

© Deepthi.com, 2003-2005. All Rights Reserved.
Contact webmaster@deepthi.com for comments and suggestions.
Sania Mirza Tennis Bollywood actors and actresses All about Cartoons & Comics Buy & Sell Stockphotographs from around the World fifa world cup 2006

India India Cricket India Bollywood