Bengali

London Oriental and African Language Library #18

by Hanne-Ruth Thompson

Bangla (Bengali), an Eastern Indo-Aryan Language, is the national language of Bangladesh with 150 million speakers and the state language of Paschim Banga (West Bengal) in India with 90 million speakers. There are sizeable communities of Bengalis scattered all over the world. Altogether, the number of native speakers make Bangla the fifth or sixth largest language in the world. Like Hindi and other South Asian languages, Bangla has subject-object-verb word order, postpositions, causative and compound verbs. Unlike Hindi it has no gender.
This volume presents a systematic overview of the language, from the sound system to parts of speech, syntactic categories to reduplicative features and some short text passages. The book is written in transliteration throughout to provide ease and convenience to non-Bengali as well as to Bengali linguists and students. In order to connect linguistic analysis with the living language, the book is furnished with plenty of real language examples, demonstrating the spirit, grace and wit of the Bangla language.

412 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Fazhoque · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my opinion, this is one of the best current grammar books on Bengali. Thompson does a fantastic job of covering just about everything and it is written in a very accessible and understandable style. I would highly recommend this book.