Bengali literature, with its millennium-old literary history, has extensively developed since the Bengali Renaissance and is one of the most prolific and diverse literary traditions in Asia. īengali has developed over the course of more than 1,300 years.

Bengali is also spoken by the significant global Bengali diaspora (Bangladeshi diaspora and Indian Bengalis) communities in Pakistan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Middle East. It is the most widely spoken language in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal, and is spoken by significant populations in other states including in Delhi, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Within India, Bengali is the official language of the states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley region of the state of Assam. It serves as the lingua franca of the nation, with 98% of Bangladeshis being fluent in Bengali as their first language. The official and de facto national language of Bangladesh is Modern Standard Bengali. With approximately 228 million native speakers and another 37 million as second language speakers, Bengali is the fifth most-spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total number of speakers in the world. It is the official and most widely spoken language of Bangladesh and second most widely spoken of the 22 scheduled languages of India, behind Hindi. There are also a significant number of Bengali speakers in the Indian state of Tripura and Assam's Barak Valley.

A series of picture stories narrated in Bengaliīengali / b ɛ ŋ ˈ ɡ ɔː l i/, also known by its endonym Bangla ( বাংলা ), is an Indo-Aryan language primarily spoken by the Bengalis in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent, native to Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

Bengali consonants