বাংলা
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Bengali is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Bengali involves.
Lingo7 does not read Bengali yet: the app has no Bengali dictionary, audio or shelf of books. You can vote for Bengali here. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Bengali is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Bengali is ready.
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We use your email only to tell you when Bengali launches, and delete it whenever you ask. Privacy policy
The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Bengali would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: Bangladesh; India (West Bengal, Tripura, the Barak Valley of Assam)
Bengali is written in the Bengali-Assamese script, an abugida like Devanagari: each consonant carries a built-in vowel, and other vowels are signs attached around it. The built-in vowel is an open o, close to the vowel of British "hot", not a, so কলম (pen) is read kolom. Letters hang from a headline (the matra) that links them within a word, and a vertical stroke, the danda (।), ends a sentence.
Spelling keeps many Sanskrit distinctions that speech has lost. শ, ষ and স are all pronounced sh in modern Bengali, ন and ণ are both n, and জ and য are both j, so reading aloud is easier than spelling. Many consonant clusters are written as joined conjunct letters, and some are not pronounced the way their parts suggest.
Older prose is in sadhu bhasha, a formal written register with longer verb forms and more Sanskrit words, the style of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee and of Rabindranath Tagore's early work. Modern books and newspapers use cholito bhasha, based on everyday speech, and sadhu bhasha survives mainly in some editorials and official documents. For a first step, StoryWeaver, a free online library, has hundreds of illustrated Bengali stories sorted by reading level.
Our free tools cover the 49 languages in the app.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Bengali needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Bengali is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Bengali dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Bengali book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Bengali launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
They are two written registers. Sadhu bhasha, the formal style of 19th-century prose, uses longer pronoun and verb forms and more Sanskrit vocabulary; cholito bhasha follows everyday speech and is what modern books and newspapers use. Learners start with cholito and meet sadhu bhasha in older classics.
The alphabet was built for Sanskrit, which had three different sibilants. Modern Bengali pronounces শ, ষ and স mostly the same way, but the spelling of each word keeps the original letter, so it has to be learned word by word.
Mostly. The script and the standard language are shared, and spelling goes back to rules set by the University of Calcutta in 1936. Since then the Bangla Academy in Dhaka and the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi in Kolkata have each issued their own spelling rules, and some publishers keep their own house style, so a few words are spelled differently.