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This article is about the Bengali language. For the script, see Bengali script.
Bānglā (বাংলা) or Bengali is the language spoken by the populations of Bangladesh and the neighboring state of West Bengal in India. There are also significant Bengali-speaking communities in Assam (another Indian state also neighboring West Bengal and Bangladesh), over 70% of Tripura, a neighboring Indian state, population speaks bengali and in immigrant populations in the West and the Middle East. Bengali is the second most commonly spoken language in India after Hindi. Lot of famous Indian literature is in Bengali, for example, the work of Rabindranath Tagore, the first Asian to be awarded a noble prize.
Bengali is an English word referring to both the language and the people speaking the language; in the Bengali language itself the tongue is called Bānglā, (বাঙলা), a term now finding more usage in English; in Bangla, the people are called Bāngāli (বাংলা). The traditional area of habitation of Bengali peoples is called Bengal in English and Bongo (usually transliterated as "Banga") or Bangla in Bengali ("Bangadesh" and "Bangladesh"/"Bangla Desh" were terms used for the entire region before partition of Bengal). The region is now broken into two parts, the western part, West Bengal, (or Poshchim Bongo) being a state in India and the eastern part, Bangladesh (East Bengal or Purbo Bongo), being an independent country.
The fight for Bengali In Bangladesh
During the period 1947-1971, when Eastern Bengal (present-day Bangladesh) was part of Pakistan, the Bengali language became the focus and foundation of the national identity of the people of East Bengal, leading ultimately to the creation of the sovereign state of Bangladesh. Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh, administrative and official work in Bangladesh is carried out in Bengali.
Around 1950-52, the emerging middle classes of East Bengal underwent an uprising known later as the "Language Movement". Bangladeshis (then East Pakistanis) were initially agitated by a decision by Central Pakistan Government to establish Urdu, a minority language spoken only by the supposed elite class of West Pakistan, as the sole national language for all of Pakistan. At the peak of resentment, on February 21, 1952, students (mainly of Dhaka Medical College and University of Dhaka) and activists walked into military fire in demand of the recognition and establishment of the Bangla language - spoken by the majority of the then Pakistani population - as a, if not the, national language of erstwhile Pakistan. The day is revered in Bangladesh and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in West Bengal as the Language Martyrs' Day. UNESCO decided to observe February 21 as
International Mother Language Day. The UNESCO General Conference took a decision to that took effect on 17 November 1999 when it unanimously adopted a draft resolution submitted by Bangladesh and co-sponsored and supported by 28 other countries.
19th May, 1961, in Silchar, a small town of South Assam in North East India witnessed another fight for Bengali language and 11 people died in police firing to protest against the forcible imposition of Assamese on the Bengali speaking people there as a state policy. The martyrs of 19th May gave their everything for the language and later the Government had to back down.
On 21st July, 1986, in another momentous day in the struggle for Bengali Language, two bengalis gave their life in Karimganj, a small town in Southern Assam, protesting against yet another attempt by the state government to impose Assamese on the local Bengali population. The two martyrs gave their life when police opened fire on unarmed protesters. This was the pivotal incident that forced the government to withdraw their unpopular legislation.
The literature of Bengali
Known by many as the Shakespeare of India, possibly the greatest and most prolific writer in Bengali is Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Influenced primarily by universalist Hindu philosophy in the Upanishads, Tagore dominated both the Bengali and Indian philosophical and literary scene for decades. His 2,000 Rabindrasangeets play a pivotal part in defining Bengali culture, both in West Bengal and Bangladesh. He is the author of the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, both originally composed in Bengali. Other notable Bengali works of his are Gitanjali, a book of poems for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and many of his short stories and a few novels.
In a similar category is Kazi Nazrul Islam, a Muslim who was invited to post-partition Bangladesh as the National Poet and whose work, like Tagore's, transcends sectarian boundaries. Adored by Bengalis both in Bangladesh and West Bengal, his work includes 3,000 songs, known as nazrul geeti.
Michael Madhusudan Dutt, converted to Christianity but made famous by his work based on the Hindu epic Ramayana, created a masterpiece known as "The Slaying of Meghnadh," (in Bengali "Meghnadh Bodh Kabbo" (মেঘনাদ বধ কাব্য)) which essentially follows in the epic poetic tradition of Milton's Paradise Lost. It is considered by those who have read it a world-class epic poem of the modern era. Michael Madhusudan Dutta is also credited to introduce sonnets in Bengali literature.
Till very late, Bengali didn't have a formally defined grammar. Bengali existed as a collection of about thousands of dialects. The first Bangla grammar, Vocabolario em idioma Bengalla, e Portuguez dividido em duas partes, was written by Manoel da Assumpcam, a Portuguese missionary, in Portuguese. Assumpcam wrote this grammar between 1734 and 1742 while he was serving in Bhawal. Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, a British grammarian, is credited with being the first grammarian to write a Bangla grammar using Bangla texts and letters for illustration: A Grammar of the Bengal Language (1778). Raja Ram Mohan Roy the great Bengali Reformer also published a book "Grammar of the Bengali Language" in 1832.
Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay was a supremely well-respected author and complex Bengali stylist and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is most famous for writing India's unofficial national song, "Bande Mataram" (pronounced in Hindi "Vande Mataram"). Jibanananda Das was a superb poet who along with Buddhadev Basu, mark the starting of the move to transcend the Tagore legacy.
Seminal Hindu religious works in Bengali include the many songs of Ramprasad Sen. His works (still sung today in West Bengal) from the 17th century cover an astonishing range of emotional responses to Ma Kali, detailing complex philosophical statements based on Vedanta teachings and more visceral prouncements of his love of Devi. Using inventive allegory, Ramprasad had 'dialogues' with the Mother Goddess through his poetry, at times chiding her, adoring her, celebrating her as the Divine Mother, reckless consort of Shiva and capricious Shakti of the cosmos. There are also the laudatory accounts of the lives and teachings of the Vaishnava saint Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (the Chaitanya Charitamrit) and Devi Advaitist Shri Ramakrishna (the Ramakrishna Charitamrit, translated roughly as Gospel of Ramakrishna).
The mystic Bauls of the Bengal countryside who preached the boundless spiritual truth of Sahaj Path (the Simple, Natural Path) and Maner Manush (The Man of The Heart) drew on Vedantic philosophy to propound transcendental truths in song format, traveling from village to village proclaiming that there was no such thing as Hindu, Muslim or Christian, only maner manush.
Script
Bengali is usually written in the Bengali script. This is a Brahmic script, very similar to the Devanagari used for Hindi and Sanskrit. Each base symbol represents a syllable, and other symbols can be added to change (or suppress) the vowel of that syllable. Consonant clusters are often indicated by ligating two symbols.
The spelling system is based on an older version on the language without some vowel merges that have taken place in the spoken language, thus it cannot be described as a completely phonemic orthography.
The sylheti language, for a long time, followed a script different from Bangla script, based on the Devanagari script. The script was called the Sylheti Nagori script.
Variation in dialects
In Bangla, there exists what is known as Sadhu Bhasha (literally "Language of Sages") and Cholti Bhasha (literally "the Running or Going Language", essentially the colloquial register of the language). The major differences between the two are Sadhu Bhasha's adherence to traditional grammar (i.e. the archaic forms of Medieval Bengali) and to a heavily Sanskritized vocabulary. Songs like the Indian national anthem "Jana Gana Mana" (by Rabindranath Tagore) and the national song of India (by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay (Chatterjee)) "Vande Mataram" were actually composed in the highly refined Sadhu Bhaashaa form of Bengali. It is not really spoken by anyone but confined to literary and formal contexts.
Cholti Bhasha, which comprises the standard pronunciation of Bengali and thus serves the basis for the orthography of most Bengali writing today, is modeled on the speech of Kolkata (Calcutta). Cholti Bhasha, as the colloquial dialect, derives its lexicon from several sources--though overwhelmingly Sanskrit-based, there are also plenty of words taken from English, Hindi, Arabic and Persian sources. Lastly, greater laxity in grammatical expression, particularly the verbal conjugations, distinguishes between Cholti Bhasha and Sadhu Bhasha. From a strictly linguistic view, Cholti Bhasha exhibits several marked departures from the traditional Sadhu Bhasha Bengali, most noticeably: clipped verbal forms ([colitechi] 'I am going' becomes [colchi]), consonantal simplication ([snan] 'bath' becomes [can]), and vowel raising ([ObbhhaS] 'habit' becomes [ObbheS]).
There are marked dialectal differences between the speech of West Bengalis and Bangladeshis. There is a stronger correlation between dialectual variations with geographical separation (major rivers, such as Padma) than with the political boundary. In the dialects prevalent in much of Eastern Bangladesh (Barisal, Chittagong, Dhaka and Sylhet divisions), the following sound changes occur: palato-alveolar affricates [c] and [ch] are pronounced closer to [ts] or [s], and aspirated [ph] is usually affricated to [f]. These sound changes are most extreme in the 'Sylheti' dialect of extreme northeastern Bangladesh--the dialect of Bengali most common in the United Kingdom. The Sylheti dialect carries a greater Arab and Persian influence while sharing grammatical features with Assamese. During standardization of Bangla in the late 19th and early 20th century, the cultural elite were mostly from West Bengal, especially Kolkata. Hence, the dialect of that part was considered to be standard. However, in current day, the accepted standard language in West Bengal and (all parts of) Bangladesh are identical.
Other than these differences of grammar and pronunciation, the third major divide between the dialects of West Bengal and Bangladesh is a lexical one. Vocabulary items often divide along the split between the predominantly Muslim Bangladeshi populace and largely Hindu West Bengali populace. Due to their cultural and relgious traditions, Muslims occasionally utilize Perso-Arabic words instead of the Sanskrit-derived forms.
Some examples of lexical alternation between West Bengal dialect(or commonly called Hindu forms) and Bangladeshi Bangla (or commonly called Muslim forms) are as follows:
- water: jol (S) corresponds to pāni (S)
- invitation: nimontron/nimontonno (S) corresponds to dāwāt (A)
- bath/shower: snān/chān (S) corresponds to gosol (A)
- god: bhOgobān (S) corresponds to Allāh (A), Khodā (P)
- aunt: māshi/pishi (S) corresponds to khālā/phupu (P)
(here S = derived from Sanskrit; A = derived from Arabic, P = derived from Persian)
The differences above depend on the region contemplated and are not always clearly distinct. For example, common people in West Bengal continue to use the words "chān" and "gosol" (or "nimontron" and "dāwāt") interchangeably with no particular bias towards one word or the other; a similar situation prevails (even among Muslims) in Hindu majority and Western regions of Bangladesh.
Though both jOl and pani are Sanskrit derivatives, 'pāni' became more associated with the Hindustani language that imbibed so much of Mughal culture and so became the word of choice for Muslim speakers of Bengali.
- Chatterji, S. K. 1926. The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language: Part II. Calcutta Univ. Press.
- Masica, C. 1991. The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge Univ. Press.
- Radice, William. 1994. Teach Yourself Bengali: A Complete Course for Beginners.Hodder Headlin, Ltd., London.
Sounds
Bangla phonetics has 45 essential and five non-essential phonemes.
See also
External links
Wikipedia articles written in this language are located at the
Bengali language Wikipedia
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