Bangladeshis include people from a range of ethnic groups and religions. Bangladesh forms the largest and easternmost part of the Bengal region. Dhaka is its capital and largest city, followed by Chittagong, which has the country's largest port. Bangladesh is the world's eighth most populous country as well as its most densely-populated, to the exclusion of small island nations and city-states. The country's maritime territory in the Bay of Bengal is roughly equal to the size of its land area. It shares land borders with India and Myanmar (Burma). "The country of Bengal"), officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh (গণপ্রজাতন্ত্রী বাংলাদেশ ), is a sovereign country in South Asia. Language is an important element of Bengali identity and binds together a culturally diverse region.īangladesh (বাংলাদেশ, lit. In 1999, UNESCO recognized 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the language movement in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). More recent studies suggest that the use of native and foreign words has been increasing, mainly because of the preference of Bengali speakers for the colloquial style.īengali literature, with its millennium-old history and folk heritage, has extensively developed since the Bengali renaissance and is one of the most prominent and diverse literary traditions in Asia. Dominant in the last group was Persian, which was also the source of some grammatical forms. Munda, Dravidian words (non-Indo-European native languages), about 7% percent of Bengali words are unmodified Sanskrit, and the remainders are from to Persian, Arabic, Turkish, English, Portuguese, French etc. With approximately 250–300million total speakers worldwide, Bengali is usually counted as the sixth most spoken native language in the world by population.ĭictionaries from the early 20th century attributed about to 50% of the Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e., naturally modified Prakrit words, corrupted forms of Aryan words, and Native Austro-Asiatic e.g. It is also the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant minorities in other states including Jharkhand, Bihar, Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Odisha. It is also spoken in different parts of the Brahmaputra valley of Assam. Within India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley in the state of Assam. It serves as the lingua franca of the nation, with 98% of Bangladeshis being fluent in Bengali (including dialects) as their first language. The official and de facto national language of Bangladesh is Modern Standard Bengali (Literary Bengali). It is the official and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India, behind Hindi. Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla (বাংলা), is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Bengalis in South Asia.