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Bengali linguistic data
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Common questions about Bengali
What linguistic data does this Bengali page show?
Word order, tone, gender count, case marking, adposition direction, syllable structure, consonant inventory traits, vowel system, morphological alignment, script, register stratification, speaker count, and geographic area. Each row is one feature with Bengali's value visible; you can add other languages to read the same feature side by side.
Where do the Bengali data points come from?
Typological features are merged from URIEL+ (Mortensen et al.) and a curated set authored against descriptive grammars. Speaker counts come from Ethnologue and Glottolog. Geographic area is computed from the Asher 2007 world language atlas. Similarity scores combine genetic distance, typological overlap, and lexical-borrowing data.
Does Bengali have grammatical gender?
No. Bengali nouns aren't gendered, and there's no agreement on adjectives or verbs for gender — unusual among Indo-Aryan languages, most of which keep at least a masculine/feminine split (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati). Bengali pronouns also don't split for he/she; সে se covers both.
How does the Bengali honorific system work?
Verbs and pronouns inflect across three respect levels: intimate (তুই tui, used for very close peers, children, or to insult), familiar (তুমি tumi, used among friends, family, and equals), and polite (আপনি āpni, used for elders, strangers, and in formal speech). Each level has its own pronoun and verb conjugation; choosing the wrong level is socially loud.
Why does Bengali have a high similarity score with Assamese?
Bengali and Assamese both descend from Magadhan Prakrit, share the Bengali-Assamese script (with a few letters distinct), and align on most Indo-Aryan typology (SOV, postpositions, three-tier honorifics). The factor breakdown chip on the row tells you which dimensions contributed most.
Sources for Bengali
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Thompson, Hanne-Ruth (2012). Bengali: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.
- Masica, Colin P. (1991). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge University Press.
- Khan, Sameer ud Dowla (2010). "Bengali (Bangladeshi Standard)." Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40(2): 221–225.
- Rácová, Anna (2007). "Classifiers in Bengali." Asian and African Studies 16(2): 125–137.
- Chatterji, Suniti Kumar (1926). The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language. Calcutta University Press.