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The population is divided between the sovereign country Bangladesh and the Indian regions of West Bengal, Tripura, Barak Valley, Goalpara, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and parts of Meghalaya, Manipur and Jharkhand. [58] Most speak Bengali, a language from the Indo-Aryan language family.
Today, the region of Bengal proper is divided between the sovereign state of the People's Republic of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. [133] The Bengali-speaking Barak Valley forms part of the Indian state of Assam. The Indian state of Tripura has a Bengali-speaking majority and was formerly the princely state of Hill Tipperah.
India has a Greenberg's diversity index of 0.914—i.e. two people selected at random from the country will have different native languages in 91.4% of cases. [11] As per the 2011 Census of India, languages by highest number of speakers are as follows: Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati, Urdu, Kannada, Odia, Malayalam. [12] [13]
It is also the de facto national language of the country. In India, Bengali is one of the 23 official languages. [52] It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and in Barak Valley of Assam. [53] [54] Bengali has been a second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011.
Bangladeshis, the most widely used term to refer to the citizens of Bangladesh, comes from Bangladesh (meaning "Country of Bengal"), and can be traced to the early 20th century. Then, the term was used by Bengali patriotic songs like Namo Namo Namo Bangladesh Momo, by Kazi Nazrul Islam, and Aaji Bangladesher Hridoy, by Rabindranath Tagore. [55]
Biggest festival of Bengalis, Pohela Boishakh. The culture of Bengal defines the cultural heritage of the Bengali people native to eastern regions of the Indian subcontinent, mainly what is today Bangladesh and the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, where they form the dominant ethnolinguistic group and the Bengali language is the official and primary language.
Bengali is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language that originated from the Middle Indo-Aryan language in the 7th century. After the conquest of Nadia in 1204 AD, Islamic rule began in Bengal, which influenced the Bengali language. [1] [2] The middle or late 14th century is marked as the end of Old Bengal and the beginning of Middle Bengal.
[25] [26] [27] Today, most Bengali Muslims live in the modern country of Bangladesh, the world's fourth largest Muslim-majority country, along with the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam. [21] The majority of Bengali Muslims are Sunnis who follow the Hanafi school of jurisprudence.