Consonants
Bengali has 29 consonants. There is a contrast between aspirated and unaspirated voiceless and voiced stops. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air. There is also a contrast between and apical vs. retroflex stops and affricates. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth. The use of consonant clusters is extremely limited, even in borrowed words.

Vowels (স্বরবর্ণ) and diacritics:

Stress
Stress in standard Bengali normally falls on the initial syllable of a word. The position of stress alone does not affect word meaning.

Grammar
Bengali is an inflected language, i.e., it uses prefixes and suffixes to mark grammatical relations and to form words. Bengali typically uses postpositions, rather than prepositions. Postpositions require that the noun take a certain case.

Nouns
There are no gender distinctions, but Bengali nouns have the following characteristics:
• Nouns are marked for case: nominative, accusative, genitive, and locative–instrumental.
• There are two numbers: singular and plural. Plural markers are added only to count nouns with animate or definite referents.
• Animacy is marked in the plural.
• Definiteness is marked with post-posited -ţa in the singular, and -gula in the plural for inanimate nouns and –ra for animate nouns, e.g., juta-ţa ‘the shoe‘, juta-gula ‘the shoes’, and chatro-ţa ‘the student’ and chatro-ra ‘the students’.
• Bengali uses classifiers when counting nouns (similar to neighboring South Asian languages), e.g., panch-jon-chatro ‘five-human classifier-students’.
• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. There is no gender distinction in the 3rd person.
• There are three degrees of proximity in the 3rd person (someone who is nearby, someone who is a little further away, and someone who is not present.

Pronouns
• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd.
• There is no gender distinction in the 3rd person.
• There are three degrees of proximity in the 3rd person: someone who is nearby, someone who is a little further away, and someone who is not present.

Verbs
Bengali verbs agree with their subjects in person and status category.
• There are three persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd).
• There are three status categories in the 2nd person (despective, ordinary, honorific) and two status categories in the 3rd person (ordinary, honorific).
• Verb stems are derived from verbal monosyllabic or disyllabic verbal bases. Markers are combined to produce different mood/aspect/tense combinations;
• There are three moods: indicative, imperative, conditional.
• Ttwo aspects are distinguished: imperfective and perfective.
• Verbs have three tenses: present, past, future.
• Bengali verbs use a post-verbal negative particle.

Word order
The normal word order in Bengali sentences is Subject-Object-Verb. Adjectives and genitive constructions expressing possession precede nouns.

Vocabulary
Bengali vocabulary is a mixture of native Bengali words, and borrowings from Sanskrit, as well as from neighboring languages such as Hindi, Assamese, Chinese, Burmese, and several indigenous Austroasiatic languages of Bangladesh. A history of invasions from Persia and the Middle East resulted in many borrowings from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. European colonialism brought borrowings from English, Portuguese, French, and Dutch.
Below are some common words and phrases in Bengali in Latin transcription. ā represents a long /a/.

Hello             ei je, nomosker, assalumu alyikum
Goodbye.       assi
Thank you.     dhonyobad
Please            doya kore
Excuse me.     māf korben
Yes.               ha
No.                na
Man               purus, manus
Woman          nari, mohila

Below are Bengali numerals 0-10 in an Arabic-based and in Bengali scripts

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