| Language
Bengali is the mother tongue of the great majority of the natives
of the state. Bengali is also the mother tongue of the entire population
of the republic of Bangladesh. The languages of the people of Darjeeling
District are Nepali and Bhotiya. Calcutta has a large number of immigrants,
so they use different types of languages like Hindi, Oriya, English, Santhali,
Burmese, Chinese and other languages. Bengali as a distinct language was
evolved probably between the ninth and the twelfth centuries, out of the
old Austric-Dravidian dialects, the Prakrit dialects which carried the
message of Buddhism, Sanskrit and an eastern variant called Magadhi of
the Northern Indian dialect belonging to the Sauraseni or western family.
Old Bengali differs from medieval Bengali developed out of this admixture
of dialects. The Bengali vocabulary has retained many words inherited
from the pre-Aryan dialects, which survive in the speech of the aboriginal
tribes.
The Bengali script is as old as the language. The script
was standardized in its present form in the 19th century. The Bengali
alphabet has 13 vowels and 39 consonants. The script has a number of joint
letters formed by conjuncture of vowels with consonants and consonants
with consonants, many of which are arbitrarily designed. The Bengali
speech had many regional variations. Modern Bengali languages possesses
a remarkably rich vocabulary having incorporated and adapted words from
Sanskrit Persian, Hindi, Urdu, English, Portuguese, also Greek, Arabic,
Dutch, Turkish, French, Japanese, Malayan, Burmese etc. The Bengali vocabulary
thus exhibits a liberal admixture of words from many languages, pronounced
and spelt in an indigenous manner. |
