Bengali

Mostly in Bangladesh, where it's the sole official language and spoken by around 170 million people, and in the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura. Diaspora communities in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Gulf, and parts of Southeast Asia add several million more.

No. Both are Indo-Aryan, but Bengali splits off into the Eastern branch and Hindi into the Central branch. Bengali has no grammatical gender, uses different verb endings, has its own script, and the spoken language sounds noticeably different. The two are not mutually intelligible.

It marks honorifics directly in verb conjugations rather than just in pronouns, has no grammatical gender, distinguishes inanimate from animate objects in case marking, and uses postpositions rather than prepositions. Verb forms encode three honorific levels for the listener and two for the third person.

It's an abugida written left-to-right, where each consonant carries an inherent vowel that can be modified or suppressed by diacritics. A distinctive horizontal headline (matra) connects letters within a word. The same script, with minor adjustments, also writes Assamese.

Compared to Hindi, the missing gender system is a real simplification. The script takes some time but follows clear rules. The harder pieces are the honorific verb endings, the distinction between inherent and conjunct consonants in writing, and the heavy use of compound verbs that don't translate piece by piece.