 West Bengal
West Bengal Language
Bengali or Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language of South Asia that evolved as a successor to Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit. Bengali is the English word for the name of the language and for its speakers; in Bengali, the language itself is called Bangla , a term that now has greater currency in English. From this point forward, Bangla will be used to refer to the language.
With more than 200 million native speakers, it is the fourth or fifth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, Spanish, English and Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu). It is also the fourth most spoken language in terms of native speakers . Bangla is the second most commonly spoken language in India (after Hindi). Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-European languages.
As a result of the Bengal renaissance in the 19th and 20th centuries, much of India's most famous literature, poetry, and lyrics are in Bangla; the works of Rabindranath Tagore (the first Asian to be awarded a Nobel Prize), for example, are in Bangla. Many of the reformist religious, philosophical, and political movements that began in that era were led by Bengalis.
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