Bengali

Bengali is the language of the Bengal region, which is comprised of India's West Bengal state as well as the nation of Bangladesh. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language closely related to Odia and Assamese. The name for the Bengali language in the Bengali language itself is Bangla, so this is sometimes seen used as the name of the language as well.

The traditional standard dialect of Bengali is that of Kolkata. There are some dialectal differences across the Bengal region, and towards the east, Sylheti and Chittagonian/Rohingya are often considered by linguists as separate languages, and there are transitional dialects spread along a continuum between Bengali and Assamese.

Bengali is written in the Eastern Nagari script, also commonly known as the Bengali script. The Eastern Nagari script is an Indic-based script that is similar to Devanagari (used for Hindi, Marathi, and other languages). Eastern Nagari script is also used to write Assamese. As with other abugida-style scripts, there is an inherent vowel with each consonant letter.

Main Vowels

The inherent vowel in Hindi is usually /ɔ/, but in some cases, it is /o/.

Bengali does not distinguish between short and long forms for /i/ and /u/, but the original letters from Sanskrit are still spelled out in the writing system.

The vowel ऋ <r̥> in Sanskrit originally represented a syllabic liquid like /ɹ̩/, in modern Bengali this is pronounced as a sequence /ɾi/ in words directly derived from Sanskrit, which is not a different vowel from /i/, but the original Sanskrit vowel letter is still indicated in the spelling.

Main Consonants

Bengali does not have a separate letter for Indic v/w, but the letter y can be modified with a in front to become w.

Bengali also modifies the retroflex voiced and breathy voiced consonants with a nuqta dot to create flapped versions:

Many speakers merge ṛh into ṛ, and some speakers additionally merge ṛ with normal r.

Other Vowels and Vowel-like Marks

ং indicates a velar nasal /ŋ/ (in Lexx Rom romanized as ṅ same as ঙ).

ঁ indicates nasalization of the vowel.

ঃ represents /h/ after a vowel, with an optional echo of the vowel afterwards as well. is used only in words derived directly from Sanskrit, romanized as ḥ.

There are also some other Sanskrit syllabic liquid vowel letters that are extremely rare, even in Sanskrit:

These letters will practically never be encountered in written Bengali unless one is reading specifically about Sanskrit.