Bengali

Bengali is spoken in the region known as Bengal, lying both in India and in the new nation of Bangladesh. In the latter it is spoken by virtually the entire population of 120 million; in India it is spoken by about 70 million people in the province known as West Bengal. Only five other languages in the world can claim as many as 190 million speakers.

Bengali like the other Indo-Aryan languages has no grammatical gender. Bengali, like Hindi, is descended from Sanskrit, and is thus of the Indo-European family. It is written in a variety of the Sanskrit Devanagari alphabet, from which it began to diverge about the 11th century. Bengali literature is dominated by the towering figure of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.