Bengali dialects
The Bengali dialects or Bengali varieties are the varieties of the Bengali language, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-European language family, widely spoken in the Bengal region of South Asia. The spoken dialects of Bengali are mutually intelligible with neighbouring dialects.
Bengali dialects can be classified along at least two dimensions: spoken vs. literary variations, and prestige vs. regional variations.
Classifications
Suniti Kumar Chatterji and Sukumar Sen classified Bengali dialects in five classes by their phonology, morphology and pronunciation. They are:- Eastern Bengali/'Bangali dialects: the most widely spoken dialect of Bengali language. It is spoken across the Khulna, Barisal, Dhaka, Mymensingh, Sylhet and Chittagong Divisions of Bangladesh and the State of Tripura in India. However, it's not a widely accepted grouping as dialects spoken in Khulna are much closer to Central dialects. Dialects spoken in central, central-north and southern Bangladesh are very different from Sylheti and Chittagonian dialects.
- Central Bengali/Rarhi dialects: spoken across much of Southern West Bengal, India and Southwestern Bangladesh. It is spoken by almost 20 percent of Bengali people. The regions where it is spoken include the whole of Presidency division, the northern half of Khulna Division, the southern half of Burdwan division and much of the district of Murshidabad.
- Central Bengali dialects|North Central Bengali]/Varendri dialects: This variety is spoken in Rajshahi Division, Western and southern Rangpur Division of Bangladesh and Malda division of West Bengal, India. It is also spoken in some adjoining villages in Bihar bordering Malda.
- Western Bengali/Manbhumi dialects: spoken in the westernmost Bengali speaking regions which includes the whole of Medinipur division and the northern half of Burdwan division in West Bengal. Also included are the so-called Jharkhandi dialects spoken in Santhal Pargana division and Kolhan division.
- Northern/Kamta, Rajbanshi, Deshi and Surjapuri dialects': spoken in eastern Rangpur Division of Bangladesh and Jalpaiguri division of West Bengal, India and nearby areas in Goalpara of Assam, Kishanganj of Bihar and the Nepali province of Koshi.
Spoken and literary variants
More than other Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali exhibits strong diglossia between the formal, written language and the vernacular, spoken language. Two styles of writing, involving somewhat different vocabularies and syntax, have emerged :- Shadhubhasha is the written language with longer verb inflections and a more Sanskrit-derived vocabulary. Songs such as India's national anthem Jana Gana Mana and national song Vande Mātaram were composed in Shadhubhasha, but its use is on the wane in modern writing.
- Choltibhasha or Cholitobhasha, a written Bengali style that reflects a more colloquial idiom, is increasingly the standard for written Bengali. This form came into vogue towards the turn of the 19th century, in an orthography promoted in the writings of Peary Chand Mitra, Pramatha Chowdhury and in the later writings of Rabindranath Tagore. It is modeled on the dialect spoken in the Shantipur and Shilaidaha region in Nadia and Kushtia Districts. This form of Bengali is often referred to as the "Kushtia standard" or "Nadia dialect".
To a non-Bengali, these dialects may sound or look vastly different, but the differences are mostly in Pronunciation and vocabulary, and not so much a grammatical one, one exception is the addition of grammatical gender in some eastern dialects. Many dialects share features with Sadhu bhasha, which was the written standard until the 19th century. Comparison of Bengali dialects gives us an idea about archaic forms of the language as well.
During standardisation of Bengali in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cultural elite were mostly from the regions of Dhaka, Kolkata, Hooghly, Howrah, 24 Parganas, Nadia and Kushtia. What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect. While the language has been standardised today through two centuries of education and media, variation is widespread, with many speakers familiar with or fluent in both their socio-geographical variety as well as the standard dialect used in the media.
Regional dialect differences
Dialectal differences in Bengali manifest themselves in three forms: standardized dialect vs. regional dialect, literary language vs. colloquial language, and lexical variations. The name of the dialects generally originates from the district where the language is spoken.While the standard form of the language does not show much variation across the Bengali-speaking areas of South Asia, regional variation in spoken Bengali constitutes a dialect continuum. Mostly speech varies across distances of just a few miles and takes distinct forms among religious communities. Bengali Hindus tend to speak in Sanskritised Bengali, Bengali Muslims comparatively use more Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Bengali Christians converse in Christian Bengali when engaging in their own circles. Apart from the present dialects, there are a few more that have disappeared. For example, Sātagāiyã'. The present dialects of Bengali are listed below with an example sentence meaning:
North Bengal dialects
This dialect is mainly spoken in the districts of North Bengal. The dialects of the North do not have contrastive nasal vowels, tend to conserve the h-word medially, often go through l-n and n-l transitions, often in nouns, and are the only dialects where æ can be found word terminally.Central Bengali dialects
These dialects are mostly spoken in and around the Bhagirathi River basin, in Central West Bengal and Southwestern Bangladesh. The standard form of the colloquial language has developed out of the Nadia-Kushtia dialect.Eastern Bengali dialects
Barisailla dialect">Eastern Bengali dialects">Barisailla dialect
Western Bengali dialects
This dialect is spoken in the area which is known as Manbhum and its neighbouring districts.Jharkhandi dialect">Western Bengali dialect">Jharkhandi dialect
The latter two, along with Kharia Thar and Mal Paharia, are closely related to Western Bengali dialects, but are typically classified as separate languages. Similarly, Rajbanshi language (Nepal) and Hajong are considered separate languages, although they are very similar to North Bengali dialects. There are many more minor dialects as well, including those spoken in the bordering districts of Purnea and Singhbhum and among the tribals of eastern Bangladesh like the Hajong and the Chakma.Other dialects and closely related languages
This category is for dialects, mostly restricted to certain communities instead of a region, as well as closely related languages. Dobhashi was a highly Perso-Arabised dialect, that started developing during the Bengal Sultanate period. The sadhu bhasha was a historical Sanskritised register of Bengali. Examples of heavily Sanskritised Bengali include the Jana Gana Mana.Phonological variations
Bengali dialects include Eastern and Southeastern Bengali dialects: The Eastern dialects serve as the primary colloquial language of the Dhaka district, mixed nowadays with the standard register. In contrast to Western and Central dialects where ট and ড are unvoiced and voiced postalveolar stops respectively, far Eastern dialects pronounce them as apical alveolar and, especially in less formal speech. These dialects also lack contrastive nasalised vowels or a distinction in র //, ড়/ঢ়, pronouncing them mostly as, although some speakers may realise র // when occurring before a consonant or prosodic break. This is also true of the Sylheti dialect, which has a lot in common with the Kamrupi dialect of Assam in particular, and is sometimes considered a separate language. The Eastern dialects extend into Southeastern dialects, which include parts of Chittagong. The Chittagonian dialect has Tibeto-Burman influences.Fricatives and fricatives
In the dialects prevalent in much of eastern and south-eastern Bangladesh, and Tripura and Barak Valley of India, many of the stops and affricates heard in the western and central dialects are pronounced as fricatives. Western palato-alveolar and alveolo-palatal affricates চ, ছ, জ, ঝ correspond to eastern চ, ছ, জ, ঝ. Note that few Perso-Arabic borrowings containing the phoneme are realized as such in all dialects.The unvocied aspirated velar stop খ, the aspirated labial stop ফ and the voiced aspirated labial stop ভ of western-central Bengali dialects correspond to খ়, ফ় and ভ় in eastern Bengali. These pronunciations are more prevalent in the Sylheti variety of northeastern Bangladesh and south Assam, the variety spoken by most of the Bengali community in the United Kingdom. Note that phonemic transcriptions from left to right for eastern Bengali dialects indicate the realizations further eastwards. Retroflexes lose aspiration and variously remain like that or become alveolar. Breathy voiced stops lose breathiness. The voiced velar stop গ can fricative to গ়, and is mostly lost afterwards.
Many eastern Bengali dialects share phonological features with Assamese, including the debuccalisation of স, শ & ষ to হ .