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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.
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