Indo-Aryan language spoken principally in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.
Bengali has more speakers
some 190 million
than all but a handful of other languages of the world. Like other Modern Indo-Aryan languages, Bengali has drastically reduced the complex inflectional system of Old Indo-Aryan (see Sanskrit language ). It has virtually dropped grammatical gender and fixed stress on the initial syllable of a word or phrase. Bengali was the first of the Indian languages to adopt Western secular literary styles, such as fiction and drama.