Language is the first identity. Across the world, our mother tongue is how we first learn to express ourselves. Our understanding of the world is shaped through the lens of our first language. When this first language is threatened by colonisation, state policy, or cultural erasure, people experience it as an assault on their very sense of self. Language becomes a site of resistance, a way of protecting ancestral knowledge and asserting identity. Throughout history, people have fought and died for their first language, leading to some of the most significant socio-political movements.

The 1952 Bhasha Andolan, or language movement, was one such event. On 21 February 1952, as students gathered on the Dhaka University campus to protest against the imposition of Urdu as the only state language, armed police forces opened fire on the protesters, killing three and injuring many others. The incident catalysed the Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan and eventually led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. At the 30th General Conference of UNESCO on 17 November 1999, 21 February was declared International Mother Language Day to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

But the Bengali language the bhasha protestors fought and died for is not the Bengali language we speak today. Beyond regional and dialectal variations, Bangla, or the Bengali language as a whole, is currently undergoing a phenomenon known as ‘language shifting’. In linguistics, language shift is a sociolinguistic process in which a community gradually abandons its vernacular language in favour of a new language, one usually perceived as more dominant or prestigious.

In both Bangladesh and the Bengali-speaking regions of India, language shift in Bengali involves a gradual transition, particularly among younger generations in urban areas, towards greater English code-mixing, driven by societal pressure and educational and commercial advantages. While Bengali remains robust, this shift is characterised by the adoption of English loanwords, syntactic changes, and a preference for English in social media and casual conversations.

Does this mean the Bengali language is dying?

Not necessarily. Early Bengali emerged from the Sanskritisation of the regional language known as ‘Eastern Magadhi Prakrit’ in the first millennium CE. According to the Kolkata-based Institute of Language Studies and Research (ILSR), at least 51 Bengali words appear in the Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary compiled by the Chinese poet Li-Yen in 782 CE — proof that some form of Bengali existed as early as the 8th century, if not earlier.

In the medieval period, Middle Bengali emerged through the spread of compound verbs under the influence of Sanskrit, and the omission of the word-final o-sound was influenced by the introduction of Arabic, Persian, and Turkic languages in the region. The arrival of pilgrims, merchants, and traders from the Middle East and Central Asia during the Pala rule, as early as the 7th century CE, introduced Islamic influence into the region.

In the 13th century CE, subsequent Arab Muslim and Turco-Persian expeditions to Bengal heavily influenced the local vernacular by settling among the native population. Bengali absorbed Arabic and Persian influences into its vocabulary and dialect, including the development of ‘Dobhashi’ — a historical register of the Bengali language that borrowed widely from Arabic and Persian in all aspects. Bengali adopted many words from Arabic and Persian during this period, reflecting rising Islamic influence on the region and its language.

This intermittent evolutionary process continued well into the early-modern and modern periods. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, modern Bengali evolved from the dialect of Bengali spoken in the Shantipur region of present-day Nadia district in West Bengal, with the standardisation of the language facilitated by the colonial introduction of the printing press. Modern Bengali vocabulary is based on words inherited from Magadhi Prakrit and Pali, as well as tatsama loanwords from Sanskrit and subsequent borrowings from Persian, Arabic, Austroasiatic languages, and other languages with which it has historically been in contact.

The language shift we are seeing today in spoken Bengali, as well as in contemporary Bengali literature — in the works of writers and poets such as Smaranjit Chakraborty, Anupam Roy, Indranil Sanyal, and Payel Sengupta — is a continuation of this sociolinguistic phenomenon. Bengali is a living language, and the absorption and assimilation of English and Hindi loanwords into its growing lexicon is not necessarily a sign of its decline but a reflection of its flexibility.

Anxieties about the decline and eventual death of Bengali — though based on facts and a very real sociolinguistic phenomenon — may be premature. Bengali is adapting as it always has. Every generation — from medieval merchants and colonial printers to postcolonial urbanites and the digital-natives — remakes the language in its own image. The future of Bengali will not be a fixed, preserved relic like Latin or Sanskrit but a living, breathing continuum shaped by migration, literature, cultural exchange, absorption, assimilation, and vernacular shifts. Bengali will endure. The question, then, is not whether Bengali will survive — it is how it will continue to transform and what these transformations will reveal about the futures its speakers imagine for themselves.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

Language, Identity, & Resistance Are Embedded In The Story Of India’s Urdu Renaissance

What The History Of India’s First Urdu Newspaper Tells Us About Today’s Language Politics

The Many Peoples Who Became Bengali: A History Of Migration & Belonging