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| More on Bangla |
| Ten things you ought to know about Bangla |  |
- Bangla (or Bengali) is the official language of
Bangladesh and West Bengal
in India.
- About 220 million people in Bangladesh and India speak Bangla as their mother tongue and are known as Bengalis or Bengalees.
- Which makes Bangla the fifth most widely spoken language in the world.
- The world marks 21st February each year as the International Mother Language Day
as a recognition of Bengali people's strife to retain Bangla as the official language of the-then East Pakistan that culminated into a bloody confrontation on 21st February, 1952.
- Bangla has its roots in Sanskrit, a now-extinct language that is the precursor of all Indic languages.
- There are 12 vowels and 40 consonants in Bangla.
- To get the correct pronunciation of Bangla, turn your speakers on and just gently sweep the BPC logo on the home page with the water lily (which, by the way, is the national flower of Bangladesh).
- Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet,
was awarded Nobel prize in literature as far back as in 1913,
becoming the first recipient of the prize outside Europe and North America.
- Satyajit Ray, the award winning filmmaker, made all his movies in Bangla.
- Bangladesh is also the cradle of microcredit philosophy - a banking practice
that enables very poor people to access funds without collateral - popularised by Professor Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank.
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