Bengali

Bengali, or Bangla, is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken across the Bengal region. It descends from the eastern Magadhi Prakrit through the Abahatta stage, and was already distinct in the eighth century, when a Chinese-Sanskrit dictionary of 782 recorded more than fifty Bengali words.

The Buddhist Charyapada verses of the eighth to twelfth centuries are its earliest literature, and the ancestor of Bengali was the court language of the Pala and Sena rulers. Its Brahmic alphabet took its own course around the year 1000.

Middle Bengali, from about 1400, absorbed Arabic and Persian words under the Bengal sultans, who patronised it instead of Persian; Shah Muhammad Sagir's Yusuf-Zulekha and the Chandidas poets' Srikrishna Kirtana are its landmarks. Portuguese missionaries printed Romanised Bengali grammars in Lisbon by 1743.