Sylheti language
(Redirected from Sylheti)
Categories: Indo-European language stubs | Indo-Aryan languages | Languages of India | Languages of Bangladesh
| Sylheti | |
|---|---|
| Spoken in: | India, Bangladesh |
| Region: | Asia |
| Total speakers: | 10,300,000 |
| Ranking: | See [1] |
| Genetic classification: | Indo-European Indo-Iranian |
| Official status | |
| Official language of: | |
| Regulated by: | not regulated |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-1 | inc |
| ISO 639-2(B) | |
| SIL | SYL |
Sylheti is the language of Sylhet, the North Eastern region of Bangladesh and a few southern districts of Assam. It is also spoken by a significant population in the other north-eastern states of India. It is similar enough to Bengali to be considered a dialect, but is probably better seen as a separate language. Given that Sylhet was part of the ancient kingdom of Kamarupa (Edward Gait, History of Assam, p274), the language has many common features with Assamese. According to Grierson (Language Survey of India, Vol II, Pt 1, p224), "The inflections also differ from those of regular Bengali, and in one or two instances assimilate to those of Assamese". Indeed it was formerly written in its own script, Sylheti Nagari, similar in style to Devanagari but significantly simpler. Now it is almost invariably written in Bengali script.
Sylheti is distinguished by a tendency to slur aspirated sounds and a vocabulary that is far more given to Arabic and Persian words than the 'standard' Bengali found in West Bengal. Sylheti is spoken by about 10 percent of Bangladeshis, but has affected the course of standard Bengali in the rest of the state.