Bengali Script: A Billion Voices
Bengali is the seventh most spoken language in the world, with around 230 million native speakers and a literary tradition stretching back nearly a thousand years. The script used to write it — a Brahmic abugida closely related to Devanagari — encodes not just Bengali but also Assamese and several smaller languages of northeastern India and Bangladesh. It is one of the most widely used scripts in Asia.
Visual Character
The Bengali script shares the Devanagari "headline" — a horizontal bar connecting the tops of letters — and the general structure of consonants with inherent "a" vowels, modified by vowel diacritics. But Bengali letters have a more rounded, fluid aesthetic than the angular precision of some other Brahmic scripts. Certain letterforms are distinctive: the curved shape of the character for "b" and the complex stacked consonant clusters (juktakshar) that join two or more consonants in a single glyph.
Bengali has its own set of digits, though Arabic-Indic and Western Arabic numerals are also commonly used, particularly in digital contexts.
Rabindranath Tagore and Bengali Literature
Bengali literature is among the richest in Asia. Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, wrote poetry, novels, short stories, and songs in Bengali. His composition "Amar Shonar Bangla" ("My Golden Bengal") became the national anthem of Bangladesh; "Jana Gana Mana," also in Bengali, became India's national anthem. The script that encodes these anthems is literally the foundation of two national identities.
The Language Movement
In 1952, Pakistani authorities attempted to impose Urdu (in Arabic script) as the sole official language of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), suppressing Bengali. Students in Dhaka protested, and police opened fire, killing several demonstrators on February 21st. The Language Movement became a founding story of Bengali identity and Bangladeshi nationalism. February 21st is now celebrated as International Mother Language Day by UNESCO.
Explore the scripts catalog for more South Asian writing systems, or compare Bengali with Devanagari using the comparison tool.