Short answers, pulled from the story.
Five students and political activists were killed on the 21st of February 1952 near the campus of the University of Dhaka. This event marked the first martyrs to die for the right to speak their mother tongue and ignited the Bengali language movement.
The Bengali script is an abugida that evolved from a modified Brahmic script around 1000 CE. It features a distinctive horizontal line called the matra that runs along the tops of the graphemes.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of both Bangladesh and India in Bengali. His works include Jana Gana Mana and Amar Sonar Bangla, which were composed in the Sadhu bhasha style.
UNESCO designated the 21st of February as International Mother Language Day in 1999. This decision honored the memory of the 1952 protests and the sacrifice of the five students killed for the right to speak their mother tongue.
Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language in the world with over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million as second language speakers as of 2025. It is the official language of Bangladesh where 98% of the population uses it as their first language.
Bengali follows a subject-object-verb word order and uses postpositions instead of prepositions. Nouns in Bengali are not assigned gender, leading to minimal changes in adjectives while verbs are heavily conjugated with over 200 possible inflections.