Bengali language

Bengali is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia. It is the national and official language of the People's Republic of Bangladesh, and an official language of several northeastern states of the Republic of India, including West Bengal, Tripura, Assam (Barak Valley) and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

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 * Like many other Indian languages, Bengali has three levels of second-person pronouns: tui, tumi and apni, in increasing order of formality.


 * In the nineteenth century Bengali replaced Sanskrit as the literary language of Bengal; the novelist Chatterjee was its Boccaccio, the poet Tagore was its Petrarch.
 * Will Durant, Our Oriental Heritage : India and Her Neighbors.


 * In actual life, it is impossible to separate us into two nations. We are not two nations. Every Moslem will have a Hindu name if he goes back far enough in his family history. Every Moslem is merely a Hindu who has accepted Islam. That does not create nationality. … We in India have a common culture. In the North, Hindi and Urdu are understood by both Hindus and Moslems. In Madras, Hindus and Moslems speak Tamil, and in Bengal, they both speak Bengali and neither Hindi nor Urdu. When communal riots take place, they are always provoked by incidents over cows and by religious processions. That means that it is our superstitions that create the trouble and not our separate nationalities.
 * Mahatma Gandhi, Conversations with Louis Fischer, June 6, 1942, in Louis Fischer, A Week with Gandhi, pp. 45-46.


 * The system of learning Bengalee among the natives .... their notion of learning Bengalee was by learning Sanscrit. If you make a man a good Sanscrit scholar he will be able to write Bengalee with perfect accuracy and elegance.... Bengalee is the language most akin to Sanscrit. I have taken pains to ascertain the proportion of Sanscrit in the first 500 words... they amount to 350.... Sanscrit forms the very body of most of the dialects, particularly of Upper India, and though it is not so essentially a part of the languages of Southern India, yet it enters so largely into the composition of even the language of Malabar, that four-fifths of the words are Sanscrit.
 * H.H. Wilson quoted in Shourie, Arun (1994). Missionaries in India: Continuities, changes, dilemmas. New Delhi : Rupa & Co, 1994