1960/03/01 by Charles A. Ferguson, Munier Chowdhury · 2 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Bangladesh Politics, Society, and Development #Bengali #Linguistics #Psychology #Philosophy
paper · doi:10.2307/410622
openalex publication_date 1960/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/20
This study presents a summary of the phonological structure of the Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB) of the educated people of Calcutta. It offers neither a mass of detailed data nor startling innovations of theory, but is intended to provide basic explanation for someone who wants to know the facts about the phonology of the language. There are astonishingly few straightforward descriptions of the phonologies of the various modern languages of South Asia, and this attempts to fill that need for one of them. Bengali is one of the major Indic (or Indo-Aryan) languages of South Asia; in number of speakers and general importance it is second only to Hindi-Urdu, and in quality and quantity of literary production it is second to none. It is spoken by over seventy million people, somewhat more than half of them in East Pakistan and the remainder in West Bengal, India. There is a standard literary form of the language, the sādhu bhāṣā , quite diverse regional dialects, and a Standard Colloquial, the calit bhāṣā , which is described here. Bengali is customarily written in a special alphabet of the Devanagari type, the Bengali alphabet.