Bengali alphabet

The Bengali script or Bangla alphabet (Bengali: বাংলা বর্ণমালা, romanized: Bāṅlā bôrṇômālā) is the standard writing system used to write the Bengali language, and has historically been used to write Sanskrit within Bengal. An estimated 300 million people use this syllabic alphabet, which makes it 5th most commonly used writting system in the world. It is the sole national script of Bangladesh and one of the official scripts of India, especifically used in the Indian states of West Bengal, Tripura and the Barak Valley of Assam. The script is also used for the Meitei language in Manipur, defined by the Manipur Official Language (Amendment) Act, 2021.

From a classificatory point of view, the Bengali writing system is derived from the Brahmi script. It is written from left to right. It is an abugida, i.e. its vowel graphemes are mainly realised not as independent letters, but as diacritics modifying the vowel inherent in the base letter they are added to. There are no distinct upper and lower case letter forms, which makes it a unicameral script. The script is characterized by many conjuncts, upstrokes, downstrokes, and other features that hang from a horizontal line running along the tops of the graphemes that links them together called matra(মাত্রা). The punctuation is all borrowed from 19th-century English, with the exception of one.