Magadhi has its roots in Ardha-Magadhi, a dramatic Prakrit that was used in today’s Uttar Pradesh region by Jain scholars’. An interesting fact is that, Magadhi is also said to be the language of Gautam Buddha. This belt mostly came under the present-day Bihar region. The Prakrit spoken in the Eastern zone came to be known as Magadhi Prakrit, created under the Kingdom of Magadha. Indo-Aryan, or Vedic Sanskrit, was degenerated by locals pan India, giving rise to several Prakrits (Middle Indo-Aryan languages). Bengal was considered to be the nerve center of Sanskrit literature, especially during the reign of the Gupta Empire. Since the 1 st millennium BCE, Sanskrit was the language of ancient Bengal and was mostly spoken by the existing priests. It has developed over a period of about 1300 years. Linguistic Classification and Origin of Bengali –īengali is an off-shoot of the Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-European family of languages.
Bengali ranks 6th in terms of the highest number of native speakers and 7th in terms of the total number of speakers across the globe. There are roughly 100 million speakers (as per 2011 census) in India itself, and another 160 million speakers in Bangladesh (as per 2015 census). It is extremely sweet in its tone, and is one of the most widespread languages of India, second only to Hindi. Bengali, or Bangla, as the locals like to call it, is a language with one of the richest and most diversified literary tradition.