The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet is the standard writing system used to write the Bengali language, and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal. An estimated 300 million people use this syllabic alphabet, which makes it the 5th most commonly used writing system in the world. It is the sole national script of Bangladesh and one of the official scripts of India, specifically used in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley of Assam. The script is also used for the Meitei language in Manipur, defined by the Manipur Official Language Act.
From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali writing system is derived from the Brahmi script. It is written from left to right. It is an abugida, i.e., its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters, but as diacritics modifying the inherent vowel in the base letter to which they are added. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms, which makes it a unicameral script. The script is characterised by many conjuncts, upstrokes, downstrokes, and other features that hang from a horizontal line running along the tops of the graphemes that links them together called matra ( 'measure'). The punctuation is all borrowed from 19th-century English, with the exception of one.
Characters
The Bengali script can be divided into vowels and vowel diacritics, consonants and conjunct consonants, diacritical and other symbols, digits, and punctuation marks. Vowels and consonants are used as letters and also as diacritical marks.
Vowels The Bengali script has a total of 11 vowel graphemes, each of which is called a svaravana. They represent six of the seven main vowel sounds of Bengali, along with two vowel diphthongs. All of them are used in both Bengali and Assamese languages. The letter ( 'vocalic ô') represents the default inherent vowel for the entire Bengali script. It is the first letter of the Bangla alphabet. Other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages – namely Assamese and Odia – have this value for the inherent vowel. This corresponds to in other Indic languages using a Brahmi-derived script – all of which ultimately derive from the Sanskrit inherent vowel . Even though the near-open front unrounded vowel is one of the seven main vowel sounds in standard Bengali, no distinct vowel symbol has been allotted for it in the script since there is no sound in Sanskrit—the primary written language when the script was conceived. The use of is widespread and is found to be used in many contexts of , such as in loanwords like 'acid' and 'anime'. The sound is also orthographically realised by multiple means in modern Bengali orthography, usually using some combination of ( 'vocalic e'), , ( 'vocalic a'), and the ( ) (the diacritic form of the consonant grapheme ). Thus written with the vowel is written as . There are two graphemes for the vowel sound , and two graphemes for the vowel sound . The redundancy stems from the time when this script was used to write Sanskrit, which had contrastive short and long vowels. Bengali lost phonemic long vowels and merged short and long and : ( 'short i') and ( 'long i') are both pronounced ; and ( 'short u') and ( 'long u') are both pronounced in modern Bengali. The letters are preserved in the Bengali script with their traditional names, as they serve an etymological function in preserving the original Sanskrit spelling (e.g., in tatsama words). The grapheme ( 'short ri') does not actually represent a vowel phoneme in Bengali, but instead represents the consonant-vowel combination . Nevertheless, it is included in the vowel section of the inventory of the Bengali script. This inconsistency is also a remnant from Sanskrit, where the grapheme represents the vocalic equivalent of a retroflex approximant (possibly an r-colored vowel). A similar (and now obsolete) grapheme, ( 'short li'), which represented the vocalic equivalent of a dental approximant in Sanskrit but actually represented the consonant-vowel combination in Bengali, was once included in the Bengali alphabet, but was eventually discarded from the inventory due to its extremely limited usage (even in Sanskrit). When a vowel sound occurs syllable-initially or when it follows another vowel, it is written using a distinct letter. When a vowel sound follows a consonant (or a consonant cluster), it is written with a diacritic which, depending on the vowel, can appear above, below, before or after the consonant. These vowel marks cannot appear without a consonant and are called ( 'vowel sign'). An exception to the above system is the vowel , which has no vowel mark but is considered inherent in every consonant letter. To denote the absence of the inherent vowel following a consonant, a diacritic known as the virama ( ) may be written underneath the consonant. Although there are only two diphthongs in the inventory of the script – ( ) and ( ( ) – the Bengali phonemic inventory has many more diphthongs.Different Bengali linguists give different numbers of Bengali diphthongs in their works depending on methodology, e.g. 25 (Chatterji 1939: 40), 31 (Hai 1964), 45 (Ashraf and Ashraf 1966: 49), 28 (Kostic and Das 1972:6–7) and 17 (Sarkar 1987). Most diphthongs are represented by juxtaposing the graphemes of their constituent vowels, as in . There also used to be two long vowels – and – which were removed from the inventory during the Vidyasagarian reform of the script, due to peculiarity to Sanskrit.
The table below shows the vowels present in the modern (i.e., since the late 19th century) inventory of the Bengali abugida:
+ Bengali vowels( ) (short) (long)(vowel phoneme)(vowel mark)(vowel phoneme)(vowel mark)কন্ঠ্য(Guttural)অ -আ াতালব্য(Palatal)ই িঈ ীওষ্ঠ্য(Labial)উ ুঊ ূমূর্ধন্য(retroflex)ঋ ৃৠ ৄদন্ত্য(Dental)ঌ ৢৡ ৣ (complex vowels)কন্ঠ্যতালব্য(Palato-guttural)এ েঐ ৈকন্ঠৌষ্ঠ্য(Labioguttural)ও োঔ ৌ
Notes
Consonants Consonant letters are called in Bengali. The names of the letters are typically just the consonant sound plus the inherent vowel . Since the inherent vowel is assumed and not written, most letters' names look identical to the letter itself (e.g., the name of the letter is itself , not ).
Some letters that have lost their distinctive pronunciation in modern Bengali are called by more elaborate names. For example, since the consonant phoneme is written as both and , the letters are not called simply ; instead, they are called ('dental ') and ('retroflex '). What was once pronounced and written as a retroflex nasal is now pronounced as an alveolar (unless conjoined with another retroflex consonant such as , , and ). Although still named when taught, retroflex consonants do not exist in Bengali on the phonemic scale, and are instead fronted to their post-alveolar and alveolar equivalents. The voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant phoneme can be written as ( 'palatal '), ( 'retroflex ') or ( 'dental '). These graphemes once represented the alveolo-palatal , the retroflex , and the alveolar in Sanskrit, respectively, but have all merged into the palato-alveolar (or , depending on dialect) in modern standard Bengali. The voiced palato-alveolar affricate can be written in two ways: as ( 'semivocalic ') or as ( 'plosive '). In many varieties of Bengali, are not distinct from this phoneme, but speakers who distinguish them may use the letters and with contrast. Post-reform, the letter was introduced to distinguish it from [note]: The semivowel cannot occur at the beginning of a word. The name of is 'semivocalic ẏ'. The pronunciation of varies between the glides and . The name of is ('semivocalic y'), whose onset was originally pronounced as a glide but became an affricate in modern Bengali. It is found almost entirely at the beginning of words. When present in the middle of words, in conjuncts, is represented as a distinct letter: ( ), which is mostly silent or semi-silent. The may either alter the pronunciation of the surrounding vowel, genimate the preceding consonant, or be completely silent. Since the nasals and cannot occur at the beginning of a word in Bengali, their names are actually pronounced (i.e., (n)ĩẏô) and (i.e., uṅô~umô), respectively. There is a difference in the pronunciation of and , similar to other Indic languages. This is especially true in the parlance of the western and southern parts of Bengal, but lesser on the dialects of the eastern side of the Padma River. and were introduced to the inventory during the Vidyasagarian reform to indicate the retroflex flap in the pronunciation of and in the middle or end of a word. It is an allophonic development in some Indic languages not present in Sanskrit. In ordinary speech these letters are pronounced the same as in modern Bengali.
+ Bengali consonants( ) (Stop) (Nasal) (Approximant) (Fricative) (Generic sounds) Voicing → (Voiceless) (Voiced) (Voiceless) (Voiced) Aspiration → (Unaspirated) (Aspirated) (Unaspirated) (Aspirated) (Unaspirated) (Aspirated) (Guttural)কখগঘঙহ (Palatal)চছজঝঞযশ (Retroflex)টঠডঢণরষ (Dental)তথদধনলস (Labial)পফবভমৱ Post-reform lettersড়ঢ়য়
Notes
Consonant conjuncts
Clusters of up to four consonants can be orthographically represented as a typographic ligature, called a consonant conjunct ( , or more precisely, ). Typically, the first consonant in the conjunct is shown above or to the left of the following consonants. Many consonants appear in an abbreviated or compressed form when serving as part of a conjunct. Others simply take exceptional forms in conjuncts, bearing little or no resemblance to the base character.
Often, consonant conjuncts are not actually pronounced as would be implied by the pronunciation of the individual components. For example, adding lô underneath śô in Bengali creates the conjunct , which is pronounced (and not ) in Bengali. Many conjuncts represent Sanskrit sounds that were lost centuries before modern Bengali was ever spoken; for instance, jñô, which is a combination of jô and ñô, is pronounced ggô in modern Bengali (which does not permit the sequence ). Thus, as conjuncts often represent combinations of sounds that cannot be easily understood from the components, the following descriptions are concerned only with the construction of the conjunct, and not the resulting pronunciation.
Fused forms Some consonants fuse in such a way that one stroke of the first consonant also serves as a stroke of the next. The consonants can be placed on top of one another, sharing the same vertical line, e.g., kkô, gnô, glô, nnô, pnô, ppô, llô, etc. As the last member of a conjunct, bô can hang on the vertical line under the preceding consonants, taking the shape of bô (including bôphôla), e.g. gbô, ṇbô, dbô, lbô, śbô. The consonants can also be placed side-by-side, sharing their vertical line, e.g., ddô, ndô, bdô, bjô , pṭô, sṭô, ścô, śchô, etc.
Approximated forms Some consonants are written closer to one another simply to indicate that they are in a conjunct together. The consonants can be placed side-by-side, appearing unaltered, e.g., dgô, dghô, ḍḍô. As the last member of a conjunct, bô can appear immediately to the right of the preceding consonant, taking the shape of bô (including bôphôla), e.g., dhbô, bbô, hbô.
Compressed forms Some consonants are compressed (and often simplified) when appearing as the first member of a conjunct. As the first member of a conjunct, the consonants ṅô, cô, ḍô, and bô are often compressed and placed at the top-left of the following consonant with little or no change to the basic shape, e.g., ṅkṣô, ṅkhô, ṅghô, ṅmô, ccô, cchô, cñô, ḍḍhô, bbô. As the first member of a conjunct, tô is compressed and placed above the following consonant, with little or no change to the basic shape, e.g., tnô, tmô, tbô. As the first member of a conjunct, mô is compressed and simplified to a curved shape. It is placed above or to the top-left of the following consonant, e.g., mnô, mpô, mphô, mbô, mbhô, mmô, mlô.