Bangla is spoken as the majority language in Bangladesh and the state of West Bengal in India, and as a minority language in several other Indian states. With almost 200 million native speakers, it ranks among the top ten languages in the world in number of speakers. Based on both primary and secondary materials, the CASL Bangla grammar provides comprehensive coverage of the phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax of Bangla. Plentiful examples of naturally-occurring sentences provide native orthography, Romanization, and morpheme-by-morpheme glossing along with free translations. Unlike many Romanizations of Bangla, our system eschews Sanskritic influence and instead reflects actual Bangla phonology. We also offer comparative information of use to linguists, highlighting features of Bangla shared with the South Asian sprachbund, such as light verb constructions, as well as those that differentiate Bangla from its Indo-Aryan relatives; for example, its unique NP structure. Written in an accessible style from a theory-neutral perspective, this work will be of use to linguistic researchers, language scholars, and students of Bangla. A formal grammar focusing on the morphology is an available companion work.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

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.