Bengali is the seventh most spoken language in the world, with over 230 million speakers.

It is the official language of Bangladesh, as well as the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura, and parts of Assam.

Charyapada is among the oldest surviving works in Bengali; these mystical poems were composed between the 10th and 12th centuries.

Unlike most Indo-European languages, Bengali has no grammatical gender, and verbs or pronouns do not change according to gender.

Its typical sentence structure is Subject–Object–Verb, as in the example “I bread eat.”

“Jana Gana Mana,” the national anthem of India, was originally written in Bengali, not in Hindi.

Mughal rule and later European colonization introduced numerous loanwords into Bengali from Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English.

The Bengali Language Movement in Pakistan eventually led to the birth of Bangladesh and became a cornerstone of Bengali national identity.

The Bengali script does not use Arabic numerals; instead, it has its own distinct set of numbers—curiously, the Bengali numeral for 4 resembles the traditional 8.