Bengali today — one script, two standards
A little context before the first letter, because it explains things you will notice immediately.
Where it is spoken
Bangladesh — the national language, spoken by essentially the whole population of about 170 million.
India — official in West Bengal, Tripura, and the Barak Valley of Assam, with roughly 100 million speakers.
There are also large Bengali-speaking communities in the UK, the United States, the Gulf states, and Malaysia.
Standard and dialect
Formal written Bengali is largely the same on both sides of the border. Spoken Bengali varies a great deal by region — Dhaka, Kolkata, Chittagong, and Sylhet each sound distinct, and Chittagonian and Sylheti are different enough that some linguists count them as separate languages.
This course teaches standard Bengali, the form used in education, broadcasting, and print in both countries. It is understood everywhere, and it is the right base from which to pick up a regional accent later.
ONE DIFFERENCE WORTH KNOWING Bangladesh and West Bengal differ slightly in vocabulary — Bangladeshi Bengali uses more Perso-Arabic loanwords, particularly in religious and everyday speech, while West Bengal uses more Sanskrit-derived forms. Greetings are the clearest case, and the greetings lesson covers both.
Two registers
Older written Bengali used a formal literary register called সাধু ভাষা sadhu bhasha. Modern writing uses চলিত ভাষা cholit bhasha, the colloquial standard, which is what you will learn here and what all contemporary books, newspapers, and broadcasts use.
The script
Bengali script is used for Bengali, Assamese, and several smaller languages. It descends from Brahmi, like Devanagari, and the two look related — both hang their letters from a horizontal line. If you ever learn Hindi, a good deal of the structural logic will already be familiar.