Bengali is spoken in
the region known as Bengal, lying both in India and in the new
nation of Bangladesh. In the latter it is spoken by virtually the
entire population of 120 million; in India it is spoken by about
70 million people in the province known as West Bengal. Only five
other languages in the world can claim as many as 190 million
speakers.
Bengali like the
other Indo-Aryan languages has no grammatical gender. Bengali,
like Hindi, is descended from Sanskrit, and is thus of the
Indo-European family. It is written in a variety of the Sanskrit
Devanagari alphabet, from which it began to diverge about the 11th
century. Bengali literature is dominated by the towering figure of
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1913. |