Bengali

The sixth most spoken language in the world, and the only one with an international day named after a protest to defend it.

What sets it apart

• In 1952 students were shot in Dhaka for demanding that Bengali be an official language. The date, 21 February, is now International Mother Language Day.
• No grammatical gender. Not in nouns, not in adjectives, not in pronouns.
• It has no verb for to have. Possession is built out of being: the thing is at you.
• Verbs change shape for how polite you are being, with three levels built into the conjugation.
• Its literature won Asia's first Nobel Prize in Literature, for Rabindranath Tagore in 1913.
• It is among the half dozen most spoken languages on earth. Almost no foreigner studies it, which for a language that size is strange.

What it opens

Seventh most spoken language on Earth, the language of Tagore, the first Nobel in literature outside Europe. Its speakers fought a war in which language itself was the cause. Kolkata's bookshops, Dhaka's street food, Satyajit Ray's films without subtitles: a cultural continent that mass tourism has not touched.

Words with no translation

All the untranslatable words →

Next to its neighbours

Where Bengali parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.

Bengali vs Hindi → Bengali vs Urdu → Bengali vs Sinhala →

Bengali in the archive, next to the other sixty-six →