Short answers, pulled from the story.
Bengali has over 242 million native speakers and another 43 million second-language speakers as of 2025. This makes it the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by total speakers in the world.
The Government of India conferred classical language status on Bengali on the 3rd of October 2024. Bengali has developed over more than 1,400 years and has a millennium-old literary history.
The Bengali language movement ran from 1948 to 1956, demanding that Bengali be a state language of Pakistan after the government tried to impose Urdu. On the 21st of February 1952, five students and activists were killed near the University of Dhaka, and Bengali was made a state language in 1956.
Bengali is the official and national language of Bangladesh and the second-most spoken language in India. It is an official language of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley of Assam, and became a second official language of Jharkhand in September 2011.
Bengali uses the Bengali-Assamese script, an abugida believed to have evolved from a modified Brahmic script around 1000 CE. Its letters hang from a horizontal headstroke called matra, and the script contains nearly 285 ligatures for consonant clusters.
UNESCO recognised the 21st of February as International Mother Language Day in 1999, honouring the Bengali language movement. The date marks the 1952 deaths of five students and activists near the University of Dhaka, the first martyrs to die for the right to speak their mother tongue.