Sylheti language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sylheti সিলটী Silôţi
Spoken in:	Bangladesh, India, United Kingdom
Total speakers:	10,300,000
Ranking:	78
Language family:	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indic (Indo-Aryan) Magadhi Prakrit Apabhramsa Avahattha Bengali-Assamese Sylheti
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	`inc`
ISO/FDIS 639-3:	`syl`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Sylheti (native name সিলটী Silôţi; Bengali name সিলেটী Sileţi) is the language of Sylhet proper, the north-eastern region of Bangladesh and southern districts of Assam around Silchar. It is also spoken by a significant population in the other north-eastern states of India and amongst the large expatriate communities in the UK, USA, Canada and the Middle East. It is similar enough to Bengali (Bangla) to be considered a dialect of that language, but at times it is probably better seen as a separate language. Given that Sylhet was part of the ancient kingdom of Kamarupa,<ref>Edward Gait, History of Assam, p274</ref> the language has many common features with Assamese, including the existence of a larger set of fricatives than other East Indic languages. According to Grierson,<ref>George Grierson, Language Survey of India, Vol II, Pt 1, p224</ref> "The inflections also differ from those of regular Bengali, and in one or two instances assimilate to those of Assamese". Indeed it was formerly written in its own script, Sylheti Nagari, similar in style to Kaithi but with differences. Now it is almost invariably written in Bengali script.

Sylheti is distinguished by a wide range of fricative sounds (which correspond to aspirated stops in closely-related languages such as Bangla), the lack of breathy voiced stops seen in many other Indic languages, word-final stress, and a relatively large set of loanwords from Arabic, Hindi and Persian. Sylheti is spoken by about 10 percent of Bangladeshis, but has affected the course of standard Bengali in the rest of the state.^{[citation needed]}