INTRODUCTION
1. Bengali is a member of the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. With its sister-speech Assamese, Bengali forms the easternmost language in the IE. linguistic area, just as the Celtic Irish and the Germanic Icelandic are the westernmost. It has been in existence as an independent and characterised language, or, rather, as a distinct dialect group, for nearly ten centuries.
2. Among the languages and dialects of India, Bengali is the speech of the largest number of people,[1] 48,367,915 persons having returned it as their mother-tongue during the census of 1911. Bengali is spoken by 92 per cent. of the population of the province of Bengal; and portions of Assam and of Bihar and Orissa linguistically form parts of Bengal. Bengali shades off into its sister-languages Oṛiyā, Magahī and Maithilī in the west, and into Assamese in the north-east. Apart from other Indo-Aryan speeches, notably Hindōstani (which is spoken with varying degrees
- ↑ Of course, a modified form of Western Hindi (Hindōstanī, Hindī or Urdū) is the lingua franca of all Aryan-speaking India, and is the established language of literature, of education, of the law-court and of public life in the Bihārī, Eastern Hindī, Panjābī and Lahndī, Central and Western Pahāṛī, and Rājasthānī tracts. From this, Hindī or Hindōstānī is often loosely regarded as the language of the people of all Aryan India excluding Sindh, Gujarat, the Mahratta country, Orissa, Bengal and Assam, Nepal, Kashmir, and to some extent the Panjab,—of a tract with a population of over 112 (including the Panjab, over 133) millions. Hindī or Hindōstānī is unquestionably tho most important language of India, and the only speech which can be said to be truly national for all India; but it, together with other forms of Western Hindi, like Braj-bhākhā, Kanaujī, Bundēlī, etc., is the mother-tongue, the home-language of a little over 41½ millions only (according to the census of 1911). Taking into consideration the number of people speaking it as their mother-tongue, Bengali is the seventh language of the world, coming after Northern Chinese, English, Russian, German, Spanish, and Japanese; although as a great world-speech, Hindōstānī alone of Indian languages can rank with English, French, Spanish and Arabic.
