Bengali Script Demystified: Vowels

I’ve spent the last two semesters learning the Bengali language, known natively as Bangla. This East Indian and Bangladeshi language is the second most-spoken in the Indian subcontinent (after Hindi/Urdu and its dialects), and the fifth most-spoken in the whole word, by number of native speakers. Bengalis are also the third largest ethnic group in the world, and the largest in India.

The culture and history of Bengal are rich and beautiful. There was an explosion of arts and academics during the 19th and 20th centuries, known as the Bengali Renaissance. Rabindranath Tagore wrote the national anthems of India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and is considered one of the great Indian poets of all time – almost every Bengali household has a copy of Gitanjali on their shelf. Satyendra Nath Bose developed the theory of Bose-Einstein condensates, and is the namesake of the boson. Satyajit Ray directed films like the Apu Trilogy (the namesake of the Simpsons character) and influenced Western directors like Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson. Despite this, Bengali language and culture remain relatively obscure in the West.

One big obstacle to learning Bangla is learning the script. Bengali uses its own writing system, shared with Assamese and a few other languages, and it can be difficult to master. But there is a nice logic behind it – in the sense that if someone writes a Bangla word, there is usually only one logical way to pronounce it. (The other direction isn’t true: there are often multiple possible spellings of a spoken word and you have to remember the right one, just like in English)

This short series of articles will help demystify the writing system we use. You definitely won’t be able to write Bengali perfectly after reading this, and it’ll take some time to learn all the conjuncts and special characters before you can read it perfectly. But these articles reflect how I wish I had learned to read Bangla, as an American guy with little prior knowledge of Indian languages. I hope they spark an interest in our language and its gorgeous writing system. I mean, look at this:

Step 1: What is an abugida?

The Bengali script is an alphabet- individual characters represent sounds, not words (like, say, Chinese). However, it differs from a true alphabet like the Latin script that English uses. This is because the Bengali script is technically an abugida.

What does this mean?

Suppose you want to write a pure, isolated vowel sound in English – take the sound “O” like in “phone.” The Latin alphabet has a special character for “O” when it appears on its own:

O captain, my captain...

Now suppose you want to write a word that begins with the “O” sound. Then you would use the same character as before:

Somewhere Over the Rainbow...

Lastly, suppose you want to write a word that has an “O” sound following a consonant. Then you’d obviously use the same letter “O” as before:

You used to call me on my cell phone...

This is where Bengali differs from the Latin alphabet, and what makes it an abugida. There are different characters for vowels whenever they appear after consonants.

The Bengali character for “O” is ও. The letter “ও” can appear by itself in Bangla, and is a pronoun, meaning “he or she”:

"ও আমাকে ভালবাসে" (O amake bhalobashe): "he loves me“

It can also appear at the beginning of a word:

"ওফিসে গিয়েছি" (Ofis-e giyechhi): "I went to the office"

But when an “O” sound appears after a consonant, we use a different character. In fact, the “O” sound is built into the consonant – it becomes a special “marker” that we apply to the consonant, which signifies that the consonant is followed by an “O” sound.

So for example the Bengali word for “sister” is bon, pronounced like “bone.” The letters for B and N are ব and ন respectively. But we don’t write this word as বওন, we instead write বোন. The little lines coming before and after the ব (B) make it into বো (BO). Then we just apply the final ন at the end of the word.

Every vowel in Bangla has two different forms: one for the isolated form of the vowel, for when the vowel is by itself, at the beginning of a word, or the second vowel in a diphthong; and a corresponding vowel marker, which is applied to consonants to indicate that they’re followed by that vowel.

Here’s a table of (almost) all of the vowels, in their isolated and marked form:

vowel	isolated form	marked form
a or aa – [ɐ]	আ আজকে (ajke): “today”	বা বাতি (bati): “lamp”
i – [i]	ই ইনি (ini): “he/she”	বি বিশ্বাস (bishshash): “belief”
u – [u]	উ উপায় (upay): “way”	বু বুক (buk): “chest/breast”
e – [e ~ æ ~ ε]	এ এবার (ebar): “now, this time”	বে বেগুন (begun): “eggplant”
o – [o]	ও ওষুধ (osudh): “medicine”	বো বোন (bon): “sister”
ī or ee – [i]	ঈ ঈদ (īd): “Eid”	বী বীর (bīr): “hero”
ū or oo – [u]	ঊ ঊহ্য (ūjjho): “implied”	পূ পূর্ণ (pūrńô): “full”

The last two “long” vowels are phonetically the same as their “short” counterparts. Sanskrit and early Bangla had a distinction between long and short i/u, but modern Bengalis don’t pronounce it. There aren’t many words that only differ by a long/short vowel, but it can be hard to remember which to use. One tricky example is the distinction between the two words for “what” used to ask questions: কি and কী. Both are pronounced like “key.” The first is used to turn a declarative sentence into a question:

তুমি রান্না কর (tumi ranna kɔrô) - "You cook"

তুমি কি রান্না কর (tumi ki ranna kɔrô)? - "Do you cook?"

And the second is used to mean “what” as a direct object:

তুমি কী রান্না কর (tumi kī ranna kɔrô)? - "What are you cooking?"

Usually this difference is expressed through emphasis, but it can be hard to catch.

Step 2: Wait, almost all the vowels?

Yep, that’s right. There are two more vowels, which are both slightly confusing, in their own way.

One of them isn’t really a vowel at all. Depending on the context, it’s either a vowel, or a consonant, or a consonant-vowel pair. The character in question is ঋ, and is pronounced “ri“.

ঋত্বিক (ṛtwik/ritwik) – “Ritvik” (given name)

বৃষ্টি (bṛshṭi/brishṭi) – “rain”

বৃদ্ধা (bṛddha/biddha) “old woman”

In the isolated position, like in the first word, this “vowel” is pronounced [ri]. The same is true for the second word, where it is a marked vowel. However, many Bengalis drop the “r” sound in the third word, but not the second, so the vowel is just pronounced [i].

What is the explanation for this “vowel”?

Sanskrit had something called nucleic consonants. These are consonant sounds which function as the nucleus of a syllable, which means they can replace the vowel. The vowel ঋ traditionally represents a nucleic trilled consonant [r], but in Bengali, it evolved from a nucleic consonant to a consonant-vowel pair.

Many dialects of English have nucleic consonants as well. The consonants “R, L, N, M” can all function as nucleic consonants in English:

"Correction": kɹ̩ɛkʃən

"Collection": kl̩ɛkʃən

"Congratulations": kŋ̩gɹæd͡ʒəlɛɪʃn̩z

"Commendable": km̩ɛndəbl̩

(In the IPA, the vertical tick under the letter indicates that it’s a nucleic consonant)

What about the second vowel?

The other vowel sound is the hardest to master. This is because it’s usually unmarked. Most English-language sources call it the inherent vowel, because if a consonant appears without any vowel marker, it “inherently” is pronounced with this vowel in most circumstances. In fact, this is the vowel that we use to name isolated letters in Bangla (like how we say “double-u” for w): the letter ব by itself is pronounced “bɔ.”

In the isolated position, this vowel has the sign অ (note the similarity to আ):

অমর (ɔmôr) - "immortal"

But as a marked vowel, it isn’t really marked at all!

For example, the Bangla word for “pen” is kɔlôm, written কলম. But the letters here are just ক (K) + ল (L) + ম (M) – no vowel markers or vowel signs!

Let’s get into the weird orthography we use to transliterate this vowel. The first character “ɔ” is directly borrowed from the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and is pronounced like the “a” in British English”far” (in Received Pronunciation at least), or perhaps if you said “lawn” in a Boston accent. (If you’re having trouble pronouncing it, here’s a tip. First, try to make the vowel sound in words like “cut” and “buck” – this is ʌ in the IPA. Now keeping your tongue exactly where it is, round your lips like you’re saying an “o” or “u.” Try pronouncing it alongside [o] and [ɐ] to hear the difference.)

The second character “ô” is just an “O” with an accent mark. The inherent vowel alternates between two sounds – [ɔ] and [o], and the letter “ô” is used whenever it’s pronounced as [o].

The alternation between [ɔ] and [o] is somewhat predictable. There are a couple rules that completely determine which of the two is pronounced, and although these rules can be hard to describe, they’re usually easy to get a feel for. Here are some examples of these rules:

• In a one-syllable word, আ is always pronounced ɔ
  • Eg বন (“forest”) is bɔn, not bôn.
• If the next vowel is a high vowel (i, ī, u, ū) then আ is always pronounced o
  • Eg কঠিন (“difficult”) is kôṭhin, not kɔṭhin
• In words with only inherent vowels, the first is pronounced ɔ and all the rest are pronounced o
  • Eg নরম (“soft”) is nɔrôm, not nɔrɔm or nôrôm or nôrɔm.
• If a word ends in the inherent vowel, it’s always pronounced as o
  • Eg পূর্ণ (“full”) is pūrnô, not pūrnɔ

Usually Bangla/English dictionaries will have pronunciation guides to tell you which inherent vowel to use. But recognizing these patterns speeds things up a lot.

(You might be wondering how we decide when the inherent vowel is not pronounced. We’ll talk about this later when we cover special characters and conjuncts)

Step 3: Is that it?

Almost!

Finally, there are two diphthongs which receive special treatment. Although Bengali has many diphthongs, there are only two which are elevated to the status of having their own vowel characters. These are [oi] and [ou]:

ঔ, ou	নৌকা (nouka) – “boat “
ঐ, oi	সৈনিক (shoinik) – “soldier”

Other diphthongs are written by using the marked vowel sign for the first vowel, then the isolated vowel sign for the second vowel:

কেউ = কে + উ (keu) - "someone"

বই = ব + ই (bɔi) - "book"

Notice how in the second example, the inherent vowel is used in the diphthong, and isn’t marked!

Step 4: One last vowel….

The last thing to talk about is the vowel æ, pronounced like in American English “cat” (the symbol æ is called an “ash” and is used in Old English, but here it is borrowed from the IPA). This vowel is not given its own character in Bangla, but it is important and common. Usually it’s an allophone of [e], which means it’s written with the same character এ and treated as the same sound, or a variant of the sound [e], that occurs in special environments. The most common place to see æ is in words that start with a suffix এক-, the Bengali word for “one” (pronounced [æk]):

একদম (ækdɔm) - "all together"

একলা চল রে (ækla cɔlô re) - "carry on alone," famous Tagore song

It also appears in other words, including after consonants:

ভেড়া (bhæṛa) - "sheep"

ঠেলা (ṭhæla) - "to push"

There is another way to write æ – using the yɔ-phɔlô. Traditionally, this is a special character used to add a “y” to a consonant. It sometimes still functions like this:

মিথ্যুক (mithyuk) - "liar"

But when followed by the vowel [a] / আ, it changes this vowel to [æ]:

ব্যাস্ত (bæstô) - "busy"

This is actually how Bengali transliterates English words that contain an æ sound. For example the word for “campus” is ক্যাম্পাস, which transliterates to “kyampas,” and is pronounced [kæmpas].

In the beginning of a word, without any vowel, the yɔ-phɔlô still means [æ]:

ব্যথা (bætha) - "pain, ache"

There are a couple other ways to pronounce this character, and these merit their own separate article, where I’ll also discuss the bɔ-phɔlô, rɔ-phɔlô, mɔ-phɔlô and more!