Bengali Language
Bengali (or Bangla) is spoken by some 230 million people in the Ganges River delta and elsewhere in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Distinct dialects of Bengali include those of the Bangladeshi districts Sylhet (Sylhetī) and Chittagong (Chāggāyā) Some consider the latter different enough from Dhaka or Calcutta Standard forms to be a separate language.
A member of the eastern branch of Indo-Aryan, Bengali emerged as a distinct language about a millennium ago, as reflected in a compilation of Buddhist songs, the Caryapada (Caryāpada). Middle Bengali literature (1200–1800) consists of religious songs and poetic texts. Modern Bengali has conveyed national(ist) sentiment since the nineteenth century and is thus both a treasure and an area of struggle. Nineteenth-century Calcutta was a major center of linguistic modernization, where the longer verb endings and Sanskritized lexicon that constituted Sāddhu bhāśā ("pedantic language," that is, a literary register originally developed for the sort of Hindu philosophical discourse that flowered in the Bengal Renaissance) shifted to the shortened endings of the Calit bhasa, or colloquial Standard, dominant among urban Bengalis today. Literary prose per se emerged along with modern Bengali itself in the nineteenth century colonial context, as did tensions between forms of the language identified with Hinduism and Islam—Sanskritized Sadhu versus Persianized Mussalmani Bangla. At least in rural areas a mixture of these roots prevailed.
A gap (diglossia) not unlike that between Sadhu and Calit still exists between everyday speech and the forms of writing and speech associated with high culture. Relevant dimensions of variation thus include geographic and religious variants and class-linked diglossic differences. In the United Kingdom, where children of immigrants may need language classes to help them maintain their Bengali heritage, tensions among these variants are manifested in a prejudice against Sylhetī among Bengali-speaking teachers.
Phonology, Sound Symbolism, and Script
Bengali has many of the sounds of Sanskrit, including voiced aspirated stops bh, dh, and gh, though in eastern dialects these merge with b, d, and g. Regional dialects vary markedly in phonology. Nasalization is not phonemic in most eastern dialects. Several consonants in Standard Bengali, like kh and k, become h in eastern dialects.
Spoken Bengali reflects rich sound symbolism, onomatopoetic words that Dimock described as "an unstudied poetry of the spoken language" (Dimock 1989: 55), or even regular associations between individual vowels and feeling-tones (e.g., æ associated with unpleasantness). The Nobel laureate poet Sir Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was among the first to write about this phenomenon.
Bengali is written in a script very much like neighboring Assamese, which is derived from the ancient Brahmi. Read from left to right, it hangs below the line. The script is a syllabary, where the characters symbolize syllables; the vowel ɔ or ɑ rather than ə as in Hindi, is implied by consonant symbols.
Syntax, Morphology, and Sociolinguistic Issues
The commonest order of elements in a simple transitive sentence in Bengali is Subject-Object-Verb, and Bengali has postpositions rather than prepositions to express relations like "for," "under," or "in." But not all sentences need verbs. No linking verb is needed to express such constructions as "He [is] my brother."
Bengali preserves some Sanskrit inflectional morphology. Verbs are marked for aspect, mood, and tense; aspect markers like perfective -l or habitual -t immediately follow the verb root. (Grammatical forms that signal the frequency, duration, or degree of completion of actions are "aspect" markers.) Nouns and pronouns may be marked for case—nominative, objective, genitive, or locative. Subjects of Bengali sentences may be "experiencers" rather than agents. Such subjects take genitive or accusative case, and subject-verb agreement is suspended. Nouns are not marked for gender. Number marking is optional. There are about a dozen noun classifiers. These include -ṭā for countable things, -khānā and -ṭuku for other things, and -jon for persons. Pronouns are marked for number and for either respect or intimacy. Likewise, verbs are marked for the speaker's respect versus intimacy toward the subject, as well as for person (first, second, or third). This presents an ideological problem for some Bengalis who dislike making distinctions among people.
Does one call domestic workers āpni, as one would a teacher, tumi (an equal), or tui (an intimate or a social inferior)? Dil found that Hindu children generally call their parents tumi and receive the affectionate tui in return, and Muslim children generally call their parents āpni and receive tui in return. Kin terms and greeting formulas also differ in Muslim and Hindu usage. Yet both communities acknowledge a common poetic-linguistic heritage.
Further Reading
Dil, A. (1991) Two Traditions of the Bengali Language. Cambridge, U.K.: Islamic Academy.
Dimock, E. C. (1989) The Sound of Silent Guns and Other Essays. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Masica, C. P. (1991) The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Warner, R. (1992) Bangladesh Is My Motherland : A Case Study of Bengali and English Language Development and Use among a Group of Bengali Pupils in Britain. London: Minority Rights Group.
Wilce, J. M. (1998) Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh. New York: Oxford University Press.
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