That said, it will take time and consistent practice to get the hang of proper pronunciation in Bengali. While 50 might seem like an overwhelming number of letters, you’ll soon find that it is not as complicated as you may think, especially given the number of sounds a single letter in English can make. A single letter will not make more than one sound. In Bengali, each sound that you encounter will be represented by a distinct letter in the alphabet. In English, consonants and vowels can make different sounds depending on their role in the word. Pronunciationīecause there are 50 letters in Bengali, it will take beginners time to learn how to pronounce all the sounds correctly. In order to access many learning materials and improve your reading abilities, it is important to spend time learning the language’s distinct alphabet and script.

Even Hindi speakers will need to actively learn the Bengali alphabet, as the script is different from the Devanagari script common to Hindi. The simplification and standardization of the Bengali version of the script in the 19 th century CE is credited to writer and philosopher Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.There are 50 letters in the Bengali alphabet, and how the alphabet is written is unique to this language. Later, it became more closely tied to the Bengal region and standards were developed for each of the languages which use it today. In medieval times, the Bengali-Assamese script was used to write a variety of different languages in eastern India, including Sanskrit. This evolved from Siddham, a script which has since lived on in Buddhist studies, and was itself derived from Brahmi. The Bengali script is one variety of the Bengali-Assamese script, also used for Assamese and other languages. There is also extensive use of ligatures, which combine different consonant letters into one symbol. Bengali characters usually feature a horizontal line at the top, similar to Devanagari, but unlike several other Brahmic scripts. Like other Brahmic scripts, it is written from left to right, without distinguishing between upper and lower case. Consonants are written in full, and vowels are represented with the use of diacritics which modify the consonant letter. It is an abugida, and unlike alphabets such as Greek or Latin, is not written with complete vowels. Bengali (বাংলা) is the official language of Bangladesh, as well as several states in India. The Bengali is one of the most spoken languages in the world, with a total number of 300 million speakers, thanks to the large population of Bangladeshīengali is written using the Bengali script, which is one of many scripts derived from the ancient Brahmi system.