Sylheti
| Sylheti | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Bangladesh , India | |
| speaker | 11.8 million (2019) | |
| Linguistic classification |
||
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-3 |
syl |
|
Sylheti (own name: সিলেটি) is an Indo-Aryan language. It is spoken today by an estimated 11.8 million people worldwide, mainly in the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh and the Barak Valley of Assam, as well as in northern parts of Tripura . Outside these regions, there are significant numbers of Sylheti speakers in Hojai (Assam), Meghalaya , Manipur and Nagaland, as well as diaspora language communities in the United Kingdom , the United States, and the Middle East .
Sylheti is commonly identified as a dialect of the Bengali language , although many consider it a language in its own right. Phonologically, Sylheti differs from Bengali and other regional dialects. Although some claim that standard Bengali with Sylheti are not mutually understandable, others claim that the difference is relatively small.
classification
The colonial study in the 19th century viewed Sylheti as a Bengali dialect. In his Linguistic Survey of India, published in 1903 using data from the second half of the 19th century, the linguist George Abraham Grierson identified two variants of Sylheti (Western Sylheti and Eastern Sylheti) and classified them as East Bengali.
Sylheti's modern linguistic classification as a language or dialect of Bengali is discussed. The lack of mutual intelligibility is a major factor in the debate by linguists (mostly non-native) about Sylheti as a separate language from Bengali, as opposed to its official position as a dialect. This consideration by linguists is also due to linguistic properties such as phoneme inventory , allophony , inflectional morphology, and lexicons, which differ from standard Bengali. Sylhet was part of British Assam, and according to Grierson, Sylheti shares some characteristics with Assamese , including a greater number of inflections than standard Bengali. Even so, Grierson saw Sylheti as a Bengali dialect.
speaker
Sylheti comes from a region that includes the Sylhet Division of Bangladesh and the Barak Valley of Assam, as well as the northern parts of Tripura and the western edge of Manipur. There is also a significant population in the Hojai district of Assam. According to SIL International , the language has around 12 million speakers, almost three quarters of whom live in Bangladesh.
As many immigrants in the UK are from Sylhet, Sylheti is a common language of the Bengali diaspora.
font
The language is mainly written in Bengali script, but a script of its own known as Sylheti Nagari has also been developed. Historically, Sylheti Nagari was widely used by some lower-class Muslims in the east of the Sylhet Division and was mostly limited to writing religious poetry.
As an endangered font, it has since been revived mainly by academics and linguists.
Individual evidence
- ^ Iman Ghosh: Ranked: The 100 Most Spoken Languages Around the World. February 15, 2020, accessed July 29, 2020 (American English).
- ↑ Shakuntala Mahanta, Amalesh Gope: Tonal polarity in Sylheti in the context of noun faithfulness . In: Language Sciences . tape 69 , September 1, 2018, ISSN 0388-0001 , p. 80–97 , doi : 10.1016 / j.langsci.2018.06.010 ( sciencedirect.com [accessed July 29, 2020]).
- ^ Sebastian M. Rasinger: Bengali-English in East London: a study in urban multilingualism . Peter Lang, 2007, ISBN 9783039110360 , pp. 26, 27: "The linguistic classification of Sylheti is problematic and heavily debated ... Sylheti is generally defined as a dialect of Bengali"
- ↑ Ruxandra Comanaru and Jo d'Ardenne. Translation and cognitive testing of the harmonized personal well-being questions . April 2008. Office for National Statistics
- ^ Sebastian M. Rasinger: Bengali-English in East London: a study in urban multilingualism . Peter Lang, 2007, ISBN 9783039110360 , pp. 26, 27: "The linguistic classification of Sylheti is problematic and heavily debated ... Sylheti is generally defined as a dialect of Bengali"
- ↑ "Chalmers and Miah (1996) describe Sylheti as a distinct language that is 'mutually unintelligible to a Standard Bengali speaker' (p. 6), but anecdotal evidence from members of the London-Bengali community suggests that the differences are relatively small ( Rasinger, 2007) "