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Chaltibhasa is based on the cultivated form of the dialects of Kolkata (Calcutta) and its neighbouring small towns on the Bhagirathi River. In the 19th century it became standardized as the literary language and also as the appropriate vehicle for business and personal exchanges. The former was largely shaped by the language of early Bengali poetical works. Dominant in the last group was Persian, which was also the source of some grammatical forms. It is the state language ctextoken.io/ of Bangladesh and one of the languages officially recognized in the constitution of India.

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• The abugida nature of Bengali consonant graphemes is not consistent, however.
• In spite of some modifications in the nineteenth century, the Bengali spelling system continues to be based on the one used for Sanskrit, and thus does not take into account some sound mergers that have occurred in the spoken language.
• It is flanked by various Austric languages like Santali, Mundari, Khasi and Sino-Tibetan languages like Kachhari, Boro, Garo, Tripuri etc, each of them encroaching at times on the Bangla-speaking areas.
• There is also the classifier -khana, and its diminutive form -khani, which attaches only to nouns denoting something flat, long, square, or thin.
• Bengali has lots of tatsam words (words directly derived from Sanskrit) and in all these words, the original spelling has been preserved but the pronunciations have changed due to consonant mergers and sound shifts.

Bengali has been a second official language of the Indian state of Jharkhand since September 2011. It is the official language of the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and in Barak Valley of Assam. The 3rd article of the Constitution of Bangladesh states Bengali to be the sole official language of Bangladesh. Bengali is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Odisha, Bihar, and Jharkhand, and sizeable minorities of Bengali speakers reside in Indian cities outside Bengal, including Delhi, Mumbai, Thane, Varanasi, and Vrindavan. Besides the native region it is also spoken by the Bengalis living in Tripura, southern Assam and the Bengali population in the Indian union territory of Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In 2024, the government of India conferred Bengali with the status of classical language.

Stress usually falls on the first syllable of a word and on the first word of a meaningful phrase. Hindus use Sanskrit and Bangla words, while Muslims use Urdu and Arabic words, eg kaka/chacha (uncle), ma/amma (mother), baba/abba (father), didi/bubu (sister), dada/bhaiya (brother), jal/pani (water) mamsa/goxt. Even today over 2,000 Arabic and Persian words relating to war, taxation, legal and cultural matters, and crafts are in use in Bangla. Towards the end of the 18th century, even high-caste Hindus used to cultivate the court language, Persian, allowing their Bangla to be influenced by it. Hindus and Muslims differ in their ways of using the language, and even West Bengalis and Bangladeshis differ somewhat in their practices.

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Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Later, East Asian travellers and lately European colonialism brought words from Portuguese, French, Dutch, and most significantly English during the colonial period.citation needed Persian influence was significant for the development of Bengali up to the modern day, and was the primary official language in the region for 600 years, until British rule, when it was changed to English in 1836.

Because of this special status as well as other cultural influences, Bangla picked up many Persian words at this time. Persian was the language of the court during Muslim rule in the 14th and 15th centuries. The result was that many pure Sanskrit words entered Bangla from the very early stages. One of the main influences on Bangla was that of Sanskrit as this language was the vehicle of literature and culture for almost the whole of the subcontinent since the beginning of the Christian era. Many features of medieval Bangla are still found in many Bangla dialects.

Western alveolo-palatal affricates চ tʃɔ, ছ tʃʰɔ~tʃɔ, জ dʒɔ correspond to eastern চ tsɔ~sɔ, ছ sɔ, জ dzɔ~zɔ. Regional varieties in spoken Bengali constitute a dialect continuum. In 2009, elected representatives in both Bangladesh and West Bengal called for Bengali to be made an official language of the United Nations.

What is accepted as the standard form today in both West Bengal and Bangladesh is based on the West-Central dialect of Nadia, a district located near Kolkata. Bengali is the national and official language of Bangladesh and one of the 23 national languages recognized by the Republic of India. During this period, the Choltibhasha form, using simplified inflections and other changes, was emerging from Shadhubhasha (older form) as the form of choice for written Bengali. Of the modern Indo-European languages in South Asia, Bengali and Marathi maintain a largely Sanskrit vocabulary base while Hindi and others such as Punjabi are more influenced by Arabic and Persian. Some argue for much earlier points of divergence, going back to as early as 500 C.E., but the language was not static; different varieties coexisted and authors often wrote in multiple dialects. Ardhamagadhi, as with all of the Prakrits of North India, began to give way to what are called Apabhramsa languages just before the turn of the first millennium.

Unlike in Western scripts (Latin, Cyrillic, etc.) where the letter forms stand on an invisible baseline, the Bengali letter-forms instead hang from a visible horizontal left-to-right headstroke called মাত্রা matra. Like other Indic scripts, the Bengali script has Schwa deletion and does not always mark when the inherent vowel is deleted — typically at the end of words. A vowel at the beginning of a word is always realised using its independent form. To represent a vowel in isolation from any preceding or following consonant, the independent form of the vowel is used. Similarly, the graphs মা ma, মী mi, মু mu, মূ mu, মৃ mri, মে me~mɛ, মৈ moj, মো mo and মৌ mow represent the same consonant ম combined with seven other vowels and two diphthongs. These allographs, called কার kar, are diacritical vowel forms and cannot stand on their own.