Bengali-Speaking Countries: Bangladesh, India and Sierra Leone

Bengali is the sole official language of Bangladesh, an official language of the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura and of the Barak Valley in Assam, and — improbably — an honorary official language of Sierra Leone. Around 237 million people speak it as a first language and perhaps 40 million more as a second, which puts Bengali sixth or seventh in the world, ahead of Russian, Portuguese and Japanese. It is also the only language for which people have been shot dead defending its status, and the only one commemorated by a UNESCO international day.

The Language That Created a Country

When Pakistan was created in 1947, its eastern wing held the majority of the population and spoke Bengali. In March 1948 Muhammad Ali Jinnah declared in Dhaka that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan, and the response was immediate and hostile.

The movement culminated on 21 February 1952, when students from Dhaka University defied a ban on assembly and police opened fire, killing several protesters including Abul Barkat, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed and Abdul Jabbar. The dead became national martyrs, and the Shaheed Minar monument in Dhaka marks the site.

Pakistan conceded in 1956, making Bengali a state language alongside Urdu, but the grievance did not go away. The language movement is generally treated as the origin point of Bengali nationalism and therefore of the war that produced independent Bangladesh in 1971.

International Mother Language Day

UNESCO declared 21 February International Mother Language Day in November 1999, at Bangladesh's proposal, and it has been observed worldwide since 2000. The date is the anniversary of the 1952 killings.

The day is now a general observance for linguistic diversity and endangered languages rather than a Bengali occasion, and UNESCO uses it to publish work on language loss. Its origin is rarely mentioned outside South Asia.

In Bangladesh, 21 February is Shaheed Dibosh, a national day of mourning with a barefoot procession to the Shaheed Minar at midnight. West Bengal observes it too, and Bengali communities from London to Toronto hold their own ceremonies.

Bangladesh

Article 3 of the Bangladeshi constitution states simply that the state language is Bangla. Around 98% of the population speaks it, making Bangladesh one of the most linguistically homogeneous large countries in the world.

The Bangla Bhasha Procholon Ain of 1987 requires Bengali in all government offices, courts and official correspondence, with limited exceptions for foreign communication. Enforcement has been uneven, and English retains a strong position in higher education, business and the courts.

Around 40 indigenous languages are spoken in Bangladesh, mostly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts — Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Garo and others. A 2010 education policy provided for primary schooling in some of them, and implementation has been slow.

India's Second Language by Speakers

Bengali is the second most spoken language in India after Hindi, with around 97 million speakers in the 2011 census. It is the official language of West Bengal and Tripura, and co-official in the three districts of Assam's Barak Valley.

Kolkata is the cultural centre, and West Bengal's Bengali differs modestly from the Bangladeshi standard — mostly in vocabulary, with the Indian variety drawing more on Sanskrit and the Bangladeshi more on Perso-Arabic in formal registers. The scripts and grammar are identical.

Assam's language politics have been contentious for decades. The 1961 Bengali Language Movement in Silchar produced eleven deaths when police fired on protesters demanding recognition of Bengali, and 19 May is observed there as Bhasha Shahid Dibas.

Sierra Leone, Honorary Official Language

In December 2002, Sierra Leone's government declared Bengali an honorary official language. The reason was Bangladeshi troops, who formed the largest contingent of the UN peacekeeping mission that helped end the country's civil war.

At its height the Bangladeshi contribution ran to several thousand personnel, and the gesture acknowledged it. The declaration is symbolic — Bengali is not used in Sierra Leonean administration, courts or schools, and essentially nobody there speaks it — but it is a real government decision and it makes the standard list.

It is one of a very small number of cases anywhere of a language being granted official status in a country where it has no speakers.

The Script

Bengali is written in the Bengali-Assamese script, an abugida descended from Brahmi through the eastern Nagari tradition, and closely related to Devanagari without being the same. Assamese uses the same script with two extra letters.

Like Devanagari it has a headline running along the top of the letters, though the Bengali version is less continuous. It has around 50 letters, extensive conjunct consonants formed by fusing characters, and a set of vowel signs attached around the consonant.

The script also writes Meitei in Manipur, and historically wrote Sylheti before that language's own Nagari script and then Bengali took over. It ranks among the most used writing systems in the world by number of readers, roughly fifth after Latin, Chinese, Arabic and Devanagari.

How the Language Works

Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language, descended from Sanskrit through Magadhi Prakrit and Apabhramsha, and its closest relatives are Assamese and Odia. Its earliest attested texts, the Charyapada, are Buddhist mystical songs usually dated to between the eighth and twelfth centuries.

Grammatically it has features that set it apart from Hindi and Urdu. Bengali has no grammatical gender at all, which is unusual for an Indo-Aryan language, and no verb agreement for gender either — a substantial simplification for learners coming from Hindi.

It compensates with a rich verb system that inflects for person and for four levels of formality, and with post-positions and a definite article suffixed to the noun. Word order is subject-object-verb, and Bengali is one of the few Indo-Aryan languages to keep a distinct set of classifier suffixes for counting.

The Numbers Argument

Where Bengali ranks depends on which count you use. By native speakers it is usually placed sixth or seventh worldwide, at around 237 million, behind Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese and sometimes Arabic depending on how Arabic's varieties are treated.

By total speakers, including second-language users, it drops well down the table, because Bengali has few of them. Unlike Hindi, English or Swahili, it is barely used as a lingua franca outside its own speech community, so the native and total figures are close together.

That profile — very large, very concentrated, few learners — is shared with Japanese and Punjabi. It also means Bengali is consistently underestimated in casual discussion of world languages, since it is rarely encountered by anyone outside Bangladesh, eastern India and the diaspora.

Two Written Registers

Bengali had two literary standards through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sadhu bhasha was the formal register, with Sanskritised vocabulary and long verb forms; chalit bhasha was based on spoken Kolkata Bengali.

Rabindranath Tagore wrote in both and shifted decisively to chalit in the early twentieth century, which effectively settled the argument. Sadhu bhasha survives in older legal documents and a few formal contexts and is otherwise obsolete.

Dialect variation across the Bengali-speaking region is substantial. Chittagonian, Sylheti, Rangpuri and Chakma are all sometimes treated as separate languages, and Chittagonian and Sylheti are not readily intelligible to standard Bengali speakers.

Two National Anthems by One Poet

Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, the first non-European to do so, for Gitanjali — which he had translated into English himself. He remains the only person to have written the national anthems of two countries.

Jana Gana Mana became India's anthem in 1950 and Amar Shonar Bangla Bangladesh's in 1971. Sri Lanka's anthem is also credited by some accounts to Tagore's influence through a student of his, though the attribution is disputed.

Bengali literature's standing rests on more than Tagore. Kazi Nazrul Islam, Bangladesh's national poet, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Jibanananda Das are all major figures, and Bengali is one of the few South Asian languages with a substantial modern literary tradition predating independence.

The Diaspora

Bengali-speaking communities abroad are large. The United Kingdom's is the oldest and best established, dominated by people of Sylheti origin — the great majority of Britain's Bangladeshi population traces to Sylhet, and Sylheti rather than standard Bengali is what is spoken at home in Tower Hamlets and Oldham.

The Gulf states host several million Bangladeshi workers, the largest concentration of Bengali speakers outside South Asia. The United States, Canada, Italy, Malaysia and Singapore all have substantial populations.

Language retention in the diaspora is notably strong. Bengali-medium supplementary schooling, satellite television from Dhaka and Kolkata, and the size of the communities themselves have kept second- and third-generation use higher than for most comparable South Asian languages in Britain.

Bengali is among the most spoken languages in New York City and is one of the languages in which New York provides translated ballots. It is also among the top ten languages spoken at home in England and Wales. For the neighbouring cases, see the position of Hindi and the status of Urdu in Pakistan and India.