Bengali

The Bengali people occupy the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta and speak Bengali, an Eastern Indo-Aryan language in a Brahmic script. Bengali grew out of the eastern Magadhi Prakrit, and the Charyapada, Buddhist mystic songs of the eighth to twelfth centuries, are its earliest surviving literature.

Bengali was the vernacular of the Buddhist Pala Empire and the Hindu Sena dynasty, whose rule ended when Bakhtiyar Khalji conquered Gauda in 1202 to 1204. Bengal became a province of the Delhi Sultanate in 1225, but by 1338 its three governors ruled separately, and Shamsuddin Ilyas Shah unified it by 1352, founding the independent Bengal Sultanate. Under the sultans Bengali won court patronage and absorbed Persian and Arabic words; the poet Chandidas helped shape its medieval literature.

Mughal armies conquered the delta in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, after which the Nawabs of Bengal ruled until the East India Company's victory at Plassey in 1757. In the early nineteenth century a literary standard formed around the Nadia dialect.