Bengali

Why the language movement mattered for Bangladesh

In 1948 the government of Pakistan tried to make Urdu the sole state language, and East Bengal answered with the Bengali language movement. The killings of 1952 followed, and in 1956 Bengali was made a state language of Pakistan. The movement fed a Bengali nationalism that led to the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971. UNESCO has marked 21 February as International Mother Language Day every year since 2000.

Article 3 of the Constitution of Bangladesh makes Bengali the sole official language. The Bengali Language Implementation Act of 1987 requires it in all records and correspondence, in laws, in court proceedings and in government and autonomous offices.

Where did Bengali grow from

It descends from the Prakrits spoken in Bengal, which Suniti Kumar Chatterji called eastern Magadhi Prakrit, and from the Apabhraṃśa of the east. A Sanskrit and Chinese dictionary compiled by Li-Yen in 782 CE contains 51 Bengali words, evidence for Old Bengali by the 8th century. From the 13th century Arabic and Persian entered the vocabulary, and the Bengal Sultanate raised Bengali above Persian at court. The modern literary standard formed in the 19th and early 20th centuries on the west-central dialect of Shantipur in Nadia.

What makes the spelling hard to predict

The script hangs its letters from a headstroke called the matra, and a letter and a numeral can differ only by that line: ত is a letter, ৩ is 3. Nearly 285 ligatures stand for consonant clusters. Spelling still follows the Sanskrit model, so three letters, শ, ষ and স, can all stand for one sound. Words taken whole from Sanskrit, many of them reintroduced by Vidyasagar's reforms in the 19th century, kept their spelling while their pronunciation shifted.