# Bangla Hindi intelligibility



## qsr20130301

Hi,

May I know how you think about the intelligibility between Bangla and Hindi?

Once I asked a guy from Bangladesh when the people sitting next to us were speaking Hindi. He told me that he didn't understand their conversation, but his wife would probably understand them since she was into Bollywood stuff and could understand Hindi films.

I know that mutual intelligibility has to do with personal attitudes toward and exposure to the other language and is not symmetric. Hence comments from L1 speakers of Bangla or Hindi or L2 speakers of the both are welcomed.

If it's convenient, could anyone provide a comparison of Bangla-Hindi intelligibility with that between Romance languages? More specifically, is it greater than that of Spanish-Portuguese, between Spanish-Portuguese and Spanish-Italian, between Spanish-Italian and Spanish-French, or less than Spanish-French? Such comparison would be more understandable for me.

Thank you!


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## tonyspeed

This table may give you an idea with respect to vocabulary: 

http://www.geonames.de/wl-indic.html


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## lcfatima

I would say it's more like Spanish-French. There are innumerous cognate pairs but the pronunciation is so different that one cannot easily understand spoken Bangla just from knowing Hindi. Also, the grammar is quite different. I speak Hindi as an L2 as well as a little bit of Bangla. I worked in Bangladesh before and when I first arrived everything just sounded like /o/ and /sh/. It took some time for my ears to adjust and some study of the language before I could understand more. Obviously the scripts are different, but just like with Spanish and French, the cognate pairs greatly facilitate reading comprehension, though the spoken languages sound so different.

A lot of Bengali speakers have a great passive understanding of Hindi and may or may not be able to speak it well, but many can indeed speak Hindi. This has more to do with social factors than language mutual intelligibility. The same is not true for Hindi speakers, who don't typically speak/understand Bangla unless they have some connection to Bengal.


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## tonyspeed

lcfatima said:


> I would say it's more like Spanish-French. There are innumerous cognate pairs but the pronunciation is so different that one cannot easily understand spoken Bangla just from knowing Hindi. Also, the grammar is quite different. I speak Hindi as an L2 as well as a little bit of Bangla. I worked in Bangladesh before and when I first arrived everything just sounded like /o/ and /sh/. It took some time for my ears to adjust and some study of the language before I could understand more. Obviously the scripts are different, but just like with Spanish and French, the cognate pairs greatly facilitate reading comprehension, though the spoken languages sound so different.
> 
> A lot of Bengali speakers have a great passive understanding of Hindi and may or may not be able to speak it well, but many can indeed speak Hindi. This has more to do with social factors than language mutual intelligibility. The same is not true for Hindi speakers, who don't typically speak/understand Bangla unless they have some connection to Bengal.



I would assume Bengali would be closer grammatically to Bhojpuri which is on the Eastern border of the Hindi dialect continuum adjacent to the Bangla-speaking region. Indeed some of the words used in that area are more similar to Bangla than to Hindi. There is a book comparing the grammar of Bhojpuri and Bengali but it does not seem to be freely available on the Internet. "A comparative study of Bhojpuri and Bengali" by Shruti Pandey.


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## greatbear

Bangla has no feminine gender (i.e., only one gender), but otherwise the words are quite same: just pronunciation changes here and there, a bit of spelling. I would also say more close than Spanish-French - say Spanish-Italian.


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## Wolverine9

I think Hindi and Bengali are more akin to Spanish and French.  Hindi and Gujarati would be like Spanish and Italian, while Hindi and Punjabi would be like Spanish and Portuguese.


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## qsr20130301

Thanks for the word list. It's very interesting.

I studied Spanish first, then French, and I still remember how French was to me when I only spoke Spanish and knew only a little bit of French. As for Italian, I haven't really tried to study it seriously yet, except several weeks of class, which gave me some very basic ideas.

When I only spoke Spanish and knew only a little bit of French, I could not have a conversation in French nor could I understand a French article. But when I was in my Italian class, with my Spanish, when the teacher was speaking "reeeeaaaallllyyyyy slooowwwwllllllyyyyyy", we could have a conversation (he in Italian and I in Spanish), with contents way beyond lesson 1 or 2, and I could also get some general idea when reading a news article about an earthquake in Italy.

If one has learned one of Hindi and Bengali and knows some rough and basic correspondences in pronounciation between Hindi and Bengali, say, schwa <-> o, s / s' / s. <-> sh, some very basic and loosy ideas of regular singular/plural noun endings in direct case and regular verb endings in present tense, something that one would learn in lesson 1 or lesson 2 with two or three weeks, nothing fancy, can he have a slow conversation with a speaker of and have a rough understanding of a news article in the other language? (like Spanish and Italian) Or does he still need formal study of the other language in order to do that? (like Spanish and French)​


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## greatbear

^ Yes; just after a couple of weeks of study, there would be very good understanding of the article in the other language: that's why for me, Hindi-Bangla (and some other pairs like Hindi-Marathi, Gujarati-Marathi, Hindi-Gujarati) are like Spanish-Italian.


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## lcfatima

Yes, with applied study, especially if one has a high language learning aptitude, as a Hindi speaker, you can actually go from zero Bangla to simple convos in no time (immediately, not even weeks) just by reading from a grammar book to understand the differences in basic structure. But to really get good at Bangla it would take a much longer time and serious application, of course.

I'm actually in a Facebook Bangla study group and several of the members already know Hindi or are native speakers of other languages related to Bangla (Marathi and Nepali) but no one is a whiz at Bangla, everyone is still working as a learner. If you are on Facebook, I can give you the link to that group. It is a closed group but you only have to request to join. Just PM me if you are interested. Not to direct anyone away from this forum, but you can pose your queries there for more personal anecdotal experience from learners, and also to get support if you are a learner.


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## lambdakneit

@greatbear: It's difficult to justify this comparison since the differences/similarities between Hindi and Bengali are different from the differences/similarities between Spanish and French. As lcfatima had already brought to our attention, verb conjugation is quite different, Bengali (Bangla) lacks gender, and is written in the Assamese script. 

In my experience, the differences between Bengali and Hindi are greater than the differences between Spanish and French. I can see one correspondence however: Hindi seems to be a lot more phonemic than Bengali (in their respective scripts), like Spanish is more phonemic than French.


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## lambdakneit

@lcfatima: I would really love it if we had more Bangla speakers here .


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## qsr20130301

To Icfatima:

Thanks for the invitation. Is the group also for people without knowledge of any Indic languages (like me)?

Actually I had only about several hours of Bangla and no knowledge in Hindi. I stopped the class temperorily cuz the tutering was not very efficiet. Sadly and strangely, there are so little learning materials available for Bangla, a language with so many native speakers. Many things available were published way back in the 1960s or even 19th century!!


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## greatbear

^ For that matter, qsr, there is not much learning material available even for Hindi!


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## jakubisek

The word-list cited above could be a bit misleading in that it picks many words that are shared accross the languages. You could make an equally misleading list that would display words that are entirely different in Hindi and Bangla. E.g. "ab" x "ekhon", "rupiyaa" x "Taka", "hai" x "achhe" - so basic words!). Grammar comparison at random : H "maiM ne dekhaa" x B "ami dekhechhi", "dekhlam", H "maiM dekh rahaa huuM" x "ami dekhchhi".    The comparisons "like Italian and Spanish/French" are always very rough and misleading. But once accepting this favourite type of comparison, I would say that (standard) Italian and Spanish are way closer to each other than Bangla and (standard) Hindi.  I know you asked native speakers. But thought to add some comment too   While native speakers' ability to pick up a related language depends on cultural exposure and such factors (e.g. I understand 95% Polish, as a Czech, some Czechs understand 10%!!), outsiders may shed different light. While native speakers of H and B are outsiders to Sp and Fr, my view is symetric in that I am outsider to both the groups: Knowing some Spanish I could understand much of Italian immediately after getting exposed to it. Knowledge of Spanish can help for French only after you realize the sound-changes that took place in each of them to be able to relate the words. When I first arrived to study in West Bengal, knowing some (limited) Hindi and some (much better) Sanskrit, I understood nothing. (I even could not tell when the professors spoke Bangla and when English, due to the heavy accent )  So I think that Wolverine's comparison is more illustrative of the "distance", at least to us, foreigners.

One reason why Hindi speakers will find it easy to learn Bangla in no time is that Hindi has so many "dialects" (or one could say, "Hindi" refers to so many "languages" - surely Czech and Slovak are million miles closer than kharii-bolii and bihari "dialects"). Thus one, as a native Hindi speaker (unless it's a person who never saw or heard anything else than their native village  is used to be exposed to so many dialects. Now the Bihari dialects like Maithili and Angi are very close to Bangla. (Actually, much closer to Bangla then to  standard Hindi! (In grammar at least - I hope someone from Mithila will confirm what I say  Therefore, no wonder that learning Bangla is easy ("amar" will remind of Bihari "hamar", "hamro" readily, so no problem that H has a bit more different "meraa").   

One little note: Everyone in Bengal would be surprised hearing that "Bengali is written with Assamese script" (Guess where literature was first, Bengal or Assam ?  Let's say neutrally, Bengali and Assamese (plus some other, non-official, lggs of Eastern and North Eastern India) use or used the same script.  

Talking about script: While I claim Bangla and Hindi to be (relatively) distant (like Sp and Fr), the scripts are relatively close (though not as close as Devnag. and Guju). On the other hand, while Oriya is (everybody will agree, I am sure) VERY close to Bangla (no learning even required to understand each other, as far as Odissi people are concerned, at least - right?), the scripts are much more distant in their present shape.  So while Bengali script would be to the Hindi one as Greek to Latin, it would be as Cyrillic to Greek compared to Oriya. The language Oriya would be to Bangla as Portugese (eastern BIhari lggs perhaps even as Catalan?) to Spanish. The Bengali language would be to Hindi as French to Spanish. 

So, as a native STANDARD Hindi speaker, you need just few days to learn basic Bangla, but you do have to learn it (I mean, you do not understand readily (am I wrong?). As a native "eastern Hindi" (Maithili, Angi, I guess Bhojpuri as well) speaker, you do not need to learn it.  As a native Urdu speaker, I guess you'd need more time to learn as Bangla is very rich in tatsama words (loanwords from Sanskrit - completely integrated to the language since centuries, no "shuddh" Hindi process here, I think?) that help the Hindi speakers (educated) a lot in understanding. (After realizing the sound-changes that took place). Now, as a non-Indian (non-South-Asian) learner of Hindi (i.e. if you learned some Hindi and know no other South Asian language), you'll not find Bangla so close to Hindi as a native would, i.e. you'll need more time to learn it. 

A good start is to learn Benglish! Lesson 1: Bangla "bhaya" is not the Sanskrit word for fear (which is pronounced "bhoe" by Bangalis), but it is an English word. I let you guess which (so had I to, when I inquired about how to get somewhere)   

Lesson 2: It is good to realize that Bangla makes no difference between s and sh (And does not even claim to do so in its learned form, unlike Hindi).  "Officially"  (standard) has "sh" for all the three s-ś-SH letters (and thus Bangalis are renowned for having sung "God shave the queen" during British period and often like to "shit" on a chair - one just has to get used to the cultural difference   
In reality, many (seemed like majority - to me, having lived in Birbhum district, and travelled in Kolkata and Doars only) use "s" only (i.e. the no difference between the sibilants rule is kept, just "s" is the choice instead of "sh"). That is OK, quite usual for a NIA language. What's more complicated: Some speakers (East??) use "s" for the written "chh" (and "z" for "j" or "jh" or both, forgot). So this is one trickiness one has to be prepared for (e.g.: Kemon asen? "How are you"?, instead of Kemon achhen). Some dialects (only outside WB, I think?) even use h in place of s/sh, like the Assamese do, if I am not mistaken (I do not remember if I really heard this h-for-s substitution, or just heard about it)

After being able to understand Banglish, you'll be much better at learning Bengali (IMHO the sweetest sounding of NIA languages! the standard Bangla, at least). 

Lesson 1: The secret is that Bangla has some other vowels than "o", too  
Realizing this will increase the intelligibility of your speech (only the short a of other Indic lggs is reflected as "o"'s, long aa is "a"). Lesson 2: Bangla has two o's, open and closed (other-Indic short a can be reflected as either of them, positionally, but it became phonological; MIA o is reflected as closed o, or as u: e.g. Nepali "kati" - Beng "koti", H "kab" - Beng "kobe" (which day)/"kokhon" (which moment: khon from Sans. kSHaNa). Likewise, it has two "e"'s, but that is easy for English speakers (the open "e" being somewhat close to the American "a" in "man")
Lesson 3: the English short "i", if used in your Bangla, may be misunderstood as "e", quite often (the Bangla "i" being like the French one). You'll fare better with your "sheet"-type of ee, as vowel lenght is not phonological in Bangla   (That's why the misunderstanding about shitting on a chair will more likely arise with French users of English, while the English might wonder what the "sheeting" means)

Disclaimer: 
All the above is rather subjective observation, non-native, non-insightful (with grammar errors, quite possibly) and as such should not be taken too seriously and is not worth receiving any "quarrelish" refuting  
Just one man's opinions  (corrections of errors in my examples are welcome, and needed)


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## greatbear

^ A very interesting - and freewheeling - post, jakubisek.

Just for extra information, in Gujarati we have "amaaru" (for "our", but then since in Bihar "maiN" becomes "ham", hence "hamaar" starts getting used as "hamaaraa", our): you are right that knowledge with the several dialects of Hindi that have always coexisted (and one has naturally their knowledge, unless one has always remained in one's own village) helps a native speaker a lot in understanding a new dialect/language. Also, Hindi has a lot of Persian/Arabic words in it, but most other Indian languages have a lot more Sanskrit in it: right from Gujarati to Bangla, and even more in Marathi or Kannada. (That's why all these theories terming "shuddh" as something pejorative amuse me no end.) That always helps in understanding another language, as the nouns in particular are Sanskrit as it is in most of the Indian languages.


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## Dib

For what it's worth - I also think the distance between Bengali and Hindi is indeed comparable to that between French and Spanish. I think, French and Spanish have more divergent sound changes than Bengali-Hindi, but less divergent grammar. I'd guess that the correspondence in vocabulary are roughly of the same order.

I am a native Bengali speaker. I also speak Hindi and French, and conversational Spanish.

I had to learn Hindi grammar actively - not just the gender bit as most Indians usually have in mind, but also the rectus-oblique case difference, plural marking, the whole verb paradigm, ergative structures, etc. I guess, I happened to grow up as a child in a less Hindi-influenced environment than usual, which means nobody in my family watched Bollywood movies.


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## qsr20130301

To Dib:

Thanks for your reply. Could you kindly give me a picture about your listening and reading comprehension in Hindi before you started to actively studiy Hindi? (ex. genre: a newspaper article, a novel, a movie, a piece of news on tv or radio, etc... and in how far: a few words, the main idea, or the details) The scripts of Hindi and Bengali are different but I assume that the similarity makes it not difficult for Bengali readers. I'm not sure if the same holds true for Hindi readers, since there are many ligatures in Bengali, which is really a big problem for me! Please forgive my curiosity. I am really very interested in the mutual intelligibility between Hindi and Bengali. By the way, is your native 'dialect' a special one like Sylhet or Chittagong 'dialects'/'languages' or closer to those of Dhaka and Kolkata? Thank you.


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## Dib

To qsr20130301:
It is difficult to answer this question accurately, as I have no records of my knowledge at different times, and I picked up the language gradually like most 2nd language Hindi-speakers. Only that, it might have been rather slow in my case. I can only refer to some incidents that I remember from different times and try to surmise something from them.
The earliest memory of my interaction with Hindi is from the Mahabharata TV series (I remember hardly anything of the earlier Ramayana series). I was then something like 7-8. I don't know how much I understood the language, but I was already familiar with the story and apparently had no problem following the plot. I could surely understand many individual words, because I still remember that I learnt some words through these TV series, e.g. yojnaa (plan), bhaanjaa (nephew), etc. I remember them chiefly because they sounded funny at that time.
Another memory I had from a similar time-frame is that I asked someone (I think, my father), how "jaataa hai", "jaa rahaa hai", etc. were different - I might not have gotten the forms completely correct at that time, but I could clearly distinguish that there existed some forms like that. I do not, however, remember getting a satisfactory answer.
The next relevant piece of information is that I took 3 years of Sanskrit at school between when I was 11 and 14. Though we were not required to write in Devanagari script for the most part, as Sanskrit is traditionally written in Bengali script in Bengal, we were required to learn the script anyway, as this has become the leading script for Sanskrit in the last century or so. Also, a part of our textbooks were written in Devanagari. So, by 12 or so, I was perfectly comfortable in the Devanagari script. During this period, I also read a lot of classical Bengali literature, including Bankimchandra Chatterjee, who used a highly Sanskritized vocabulary. So, I became quite good at it.
I didn't, however, watch much Hindi-language TV, or try to read newspapers, etc. So, I can't really tell how well I understood them.
I do remember that, immediately after this period, when I was around 15-16, I became determined to learn Hindi properly, and tried to decode the grammar by reading texts. I think, I could understand the message of any sufficiently Sanskritized text without problem at that point, but I couldn't figure out the details of the grammar. I think, by this period I might have understood the basic verb tenses, though.
When I was 16, I borrowed the Hindi grammar book of a friend of mine, and read through it in a span of about 2 days or so. It was written in Hindi, and I could understand the ideas fairly easily, and that was my first formal grounding in Hindi grammar, as well as reading a Hindi text of any length.
I started to speak Hindi actively when I was 18, as I came in contact with many native Hindi speakers for the first time. Initially I spent a lot of time listening to others - learning many everyday words and phrases, grammatical constructions (like narrative tenses: "ek aadmii jaa rahaa hotaa"), and most importantly the gender of words (I still have confusion about the gender of some words like "samajh" which I usually hear only in oblique case, and mere/merI samajh sound very similar to me), while I mostly replied in English. Within a year or so, I was conversational. I still had huge problems with understanding Western Hindi accents (e.g. Delhi). I moved to Delhi when I was 22, and I started to understand the Western accents. Now I am 31, and I understand almost everything I hear in Hindi. I can speak fluently (if only with an Eastern accent) too, as long as I am allowed to code-switch with English. I can understand most kinds of formal Hindi texts too - the more Sanskritized, the better for my understanding (but also often more stilted-sounding). 

===

I grew up in two Bengali dialects. My primary language is approximately Kolkata Bengali. My other variant is a variety from East Midnapore district. It has many features in common with Oriya. I won't call myself a native speaker of it, but I spent the first 10 years of my life in that dialect region, though often speaking the Kolkata standard - my mom's favoured language as she came from a different linguistic background. I still visit East Midnapore regularly. So, I am an advanced user of it, but not completely fluent. We also use it as a kind of an informal heritage language inside the family.


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## Wolverine9

^ You mentioned that you pretty much learned Hindi on your own.  Is Hindi not taught in the schools of Bengal?  I was under the impression that it was taught everywhere except southern India.


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## marrish

Wolverine9 said:


> ^ You mentioned that you pretty much learned Hindi on your own.  Is Hindi not taught in the schools of Bengal?  I was under the impression that it was taught everywhere except southern India.


I learned Hindi on my own too and it is not taught at all in Pakistan. I consider mine and your response at least not worked on concerning such an effort to give extensive responses above.


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## Wolverine9

marrish said:


> I consider mine and your response at least not worked on concerning such an effort to give extensive responses above.



What do you mean by this?


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## Dib

Hindi is taught in schools in West Bengal as an optional subject. It is possible to take it as your 1st, 2nd, 3rd language or not at all. Normally people take Bengali as 1st, English 2nd and Hindi/Sanskrit/Persian/Arabic as 3rd. But other combos including Hindi  (or Urdu) 1st are possible.


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