Languages

Bengali

BAHNG-lah

Also Known As বাংলা (Bangla)

Citation Formats

General Reference

Language Atlas. "Bengali." Accessed August 29, 2026. https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/bengali.

APA Style

Language Atlas. (n.d.). Bengali. Retrieved August 29, 2026, from https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/bengali

BibTeX

@misc{languageatlas-bengali,
  author = {Language Atlas},
  title = {Bengali},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-language.interactiveatlas.org/languages/bengali},
  note = {Accessed August 29, 2026}
}

Bengali, also called Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language, the official language of Bangladesh and of the Indian state of West Bengal, and among the most-spoken languages in the world by native speakers. It has its own script, the Bengali-Assamese script, descended like Devanagari from the ancient Brahmi script but distinct from it, not a variant of Devanagari itself.

Facts

ISO 639-3 Code

bn 1

Speaker Count

237,000,000 1

Figure is for first-language speakers across Bangladesh and India; estimates vary by several tens of millions depending on how second-language speakers in the wider Bengali-speaking diaspora are counted.

Status

Living 1

Region

Bangladesh and India's West Bengal; Barak Valley in Assam and Tripura 2

Disputed

Attested From (Year)

from 782 2

8th century CE; a Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary compiled in 782 CE contains 51 Bengali words, the earliest documented evidence, though whether this represents a fully differentiated language is not certain.

Cross-Tradition Connections