Bengali

The Bengali language is spoken primarily in Bangladesh and India. Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, with more than 210 million speakers.

To be more exact Bengali is spoken in the Bengal region in the east of the Indian subcontinent as well as in the worldwide diaspora. It is also of course the primary language of Bangladesh as well as of the Indian state of West Bengal.

In Bangladesh more than 110 million people speak Bengali as their mother tongue, according to one of the latest censuses. This represents nearly 99 percent of the total population. In India, Bengali is spoken as a native language by around 100 million people, too. This makes Bengali the language with the second most speakers in India; only Hindi has more. That is why to learn Bengali gives you the opportunity to connect with a lot of people.

In the states of West Bengal and Tripura, Bengali speakers constitute the majority of the population. Larger Bengali-speaking minorities also exist in the states of Assam, Jharkhand, Bihar, and Odisha. Larger groups of Bengali speakers in the diaspora are found in the United States (260,000), the United Kingdom (220,000 in England and Wales alone) and the Gulf states, among others.