Bengali language
The Bengali, also known by its endonym bangla (বাংলা, [ˈbaŋla]), is an Indo-Aryan language and is the lingua franca of the Bengal region of the Indian subcontinent. It is the most widely spoken language in Bangladesh and the second most widely spoken of India's 22 official languages, after Hindi. With approximately 228 million native speakers and another 37 million as a second language, Bengali is the sixth most widely spoken native language and seventh by total number of speakers in the world.
Bengali is the official and national language of Bangladesh, with 98% of Bangladeshis using it as their first language. In India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of Assam state. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, as well as in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Uttarakhand. it is also spoken by significant global Bengali diaspora communities (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East.
Bengali has developed over more than 1,300 years. Bengali literature, with a millennial literary history, developed extensively during the Bengali Renaissance and is one of the most prolific and diverse literary traditions in Asia. The Bengali Language movement from 1948 to 1956, which called for Bengali to be an official language of Pakistan, fueled Bengali nationalism in East Bengal, leading to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. In 1999, UNESCO recognized the 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of this linguistic movement.
Etymology
The first native Bengali name was Gauda-bhasa in the 16th century. In the 19th century Vanga-bhasa or Bangala-bhasa. Today it is known as Bangla-bhasa.
History
Old
Although Sanskrit was practiced by Hindu Brahmins in Bengal from the 1st millennium BCE. C., the local Buddhist population spoke in some varieties of the Prakrit languages. These varieties are generally referred to as 'Eastern Magadhi Prakrit', as the linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji coined it, as Middle Indo-Aryan dialects were influential in the first millennium, when Bengal was part of the Magadan kingdom. Local varieties had no official status during the Gupta Empire, and as Bengal increasingly became a center of Sanskrit literature for Hindu priests, the Bengal vernacular was heavily influenced by Sanskrit. Magadhi Prakrit was also spoken in present-day Bihar and Assam, and this vernacular eventually evolved into Ardha Magadhi. Ardha Magadhi began to give way to what is known as Apabhraṃśa, at the end of the first millennium. The Bengali language evolved as a distinct language with the passage of time.
Early
Although some claim that some texts from the X century were in Bengali, it is uncertain whether they represent a distinct language or whether they represent a stage in which the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages were becoming differentiated. The local apabhraṃśa of the eastern subcontinent, purbi apabhraṃśa or abahatta ('meaningless sounds'), eventually evolved into regional dialects, which in turn formed three Bengali-Assamese language groups, the Bihari languages and the Oriya language. Some argue that the points of divergence occurred much earlier, going back as far as AD 500, but the language was not static: different varieties coexisted and authors often wrote in multiple dialects in this period. For example, the ardhamagadhi is thought to have evolved around the VI century to become the abahatta, which competed with the ancestor of the Bengali for some time. Proto-Bengali was the language of the Pala Empire and the Sena dynasty.
Medieval
During the medieval period, Middle Bengali was characterized by the elision of word-final অ ô, the spread of phrasal verbs, and the influence of the Arabic, Persian, and Turkic languages. The arrival of merchants and traders from the Middle East and Turkistan to the Buddhist empire of Pala, from the VII century, gave rise to Islamic influence in the region. Beginning with the conquest of Bakhtiiar Khalyi in the 13th century, subsequent Muslim expeditions to Bengal greatly encouraged migratory movements. from Muslim Arabs and Turco-Persians, who greatly influenced the local vernacular by establishing themselves among the native population. Bengali rose to prominence, over Persian, at the court of the Bengal sultans with the rise of Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah. Subsequent Muslim rulers actively promoted the literary development of Bengali, allowing it to become the most widely spoken vernacular. of the sultanate. Bengali acquired many words from Arabic and Persian, which cultivated a manifestation of Islamic culture in the language. Major texts in Middle Bengali (1400-1800) include Yusuf-Zulekha by Shah Muhammad Sagir and Shreekrishna Kirtana by the Chandidas poets. Court support for Bengali culture and language waned when the Mughal empire colonized Bengal in the late 16th century and early of the XVII.
Modern
The modern literary form of Bengali developed during the 19th century and early 20th century from the dialect spoken in the Nadia region, a west-central Bengali dialect. Bengali presents a strong case of diglossia, as the standard and literary form differs greatly from the colloquial speech of the regions identified with the language. Modern Bengali vocabulary contains the vocabulary base of Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, also tatsamas. and loanwords from Sanskrit and other major borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Austroasiatic languages, and other languages in contact.
During this period, there were two main forms of written Bengali:
- traction Chôlitôbhasha; colloquial form of bengali using simplified inflexions
- tractionা SadhubhashaSanskrit form of the Bengali.
In 1948, the Government of Pakistan attempted to make Urdu the only state language in Pakistan, starting the Bengali language movement. The Bengali Language Movement was a popular ethnolinguistic movement in former East Bengal (now Bangladesh)., a result of the strong linguistic awareness of Bengalis to gain and protect recognition of spoken and written Bengali as the state language of the then Dominion of Pakistan. On February 21, 1952, five students and political activists were killed during protests near the Dhaka University campus. In 1956, Bengali became the state language of Pakistan. Since then, this day has been observed as Language Movement Day in Bangladesh and has also been commemorated as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO every year since 2000.
In 2010, the parliament of Bangladesh and the legislature of West Bengal proposed that Bengali become an official language of the UN, although no further action was taken.
Linguistic description
Phonology
The phonetic inventory of Standard Bengali consists of 29 consonants and 7 vowels, including 6 nasalized vowels. Bengali is known for its wide variety of diphthongs, vowel combinations that occur within the same syllable.
Writing system
The Bengali script is an abugida writing system belonging to the Brahmic family of alphabets that are associated with the Bangla, Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri, Manipuri, and Sylheto languages. It was derived from the ancient Nagari alphabet.
Although very similar to Devanagari, it is less blocky and has more sinuous forms. The modern Bengali alphabet was formalized in 1778 when Charles Wilkins first created a typesetting.
Bengali text by Jôno Gôno Môno:
জনগণমন-অধিনায়ক জয় হে ভারতভাগ্যবিধাতা!
পঞ্জাব সিন্ধু গুজরাট মরাঠা দ্রাবিড় উত্কল বঙ্ট/>
বিন্ধ্য হিমাচল যমুনা গঙ্গা উচ্ছলজলধিতরঙ্গ
তব শুভ নামে জাগে, তব শুভ আশিস মাগে,
গাহে তব জয়গাথা।
জয় হে, জয় হে, জয় হে, জয় জয় জয়, জয় হে॥
জনগণমন-অধিনায়ক জয় হে ভারতভাগ্যবিধাতা!
Vocabulary
Bengali has up to 100,000 distinct words, of which 50,000 are considered tadbhavas, 21,100 are tatsamas, and the rest are borrowings from Austroasiatic and other foreign languages.
However, these figures do not take into account the large proportion of archaic or highly technical words that are rarely used. Also, the different dialects use more Persian and Arabic vocabulary, especially in different parts of Bangladesh and in the Muslim-majority parts of West Bengal. Hindus, for their part, use more Sanskrit vocabulary than Muslims. While Standard Bengali is based on the Nadia dialect spoken in the Hindu-majority states of West Bengal and in parts of the Muslim-majority khulna division of Bangladesh, about 90% of Bangladeshi Bengalis (some 148 million) and 27% of Bengalis in West Bengal and 10% of those in Assam (about 36 million) are Muslim, speaking a more "Persio-Arabized" from Bengali instead of the standard Nadia dialect, more influenced by Sanskrit. In fact, the productive vocabulary used in modern literary works is composed mostly (67%) of tadbhavas, while tatsamas only represent 25% of the total. Loans from non-Indic languages represent the remaining 8% of the vocabulary used. in modern Bengali literature.
According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji, dictionaries of the early XX century attributed around 50% of Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e. naturally modified Prakrit words, corrupted forms of Aryan words, and non-Indo-European languages). About 45% of Bengali words are unmodified Sanskrit, with the remainder coming from foreign languages. The latter group is dominated by Persian, which is also the source of some grammatical forms. More recent studies suggest that the use of native and foreign words has been increasing, mainly due to the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style. Due to centuries of contact with Europeans, Turkic peoples and Persians, the Bengali has absorbed numerous words from foreign languages, often fully integrating these loanwords into the main vocabulary.
The most common borrowings from foreign languages come from three different types of contact. Following close contact with various indigenous Austroasiatic languages, and later the Mughal invasion, whose court language was Persian, numerous Chagate, Arabic and Persian words were absorbed into the lexicon.
Later, travelers from East Asia and lately European colonialism brought words from Portuguese, French, Dutch and, above all, English during the colonial period.
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