There are cases where speakers of Standard Bengali in West Bengal will use a different word from a speaker of Standard Bengali in Bangladesh, even though both words are of native Bengali descent. During the standardisation of Modern Bengali in the 19th century and early 20th century, the cultural centre of Bengal was in Kolkata, a city founded by the British. Some varieties of Bengali, particularly Sylheti, Chittagonian and Chakma, have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker’s voice can distinguish words. Regional varieties in spoken Bengali constitute a dialect continuum.<\/p>\n
A vowel at the beginning of a word is always realised using its independent form. To represent a vowel in isolation from any preceding or following consonant, the independent form of the vowel is used. A consonant sound followed by some vowel sound other than the inherent \u0254 is orthographically realised by using a variety of vowel allographs above, below, before, after, or around the consonant sign, thus forming the ubiquitous consonant-vowel typographic ligatures. Since the Bengali script is an abugida, its consonant graphemes usually do not represent phonetic segments, but carry an “inherent” vowel and thus are syllabic in nature. Native Bengali words do not allow initial consonant clusters; the maximum syllabic structure is CVC (i.e., one vowel flanked by a consonant on each side).<\/p>\n
The potential influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology of Eastern Bengali is used to explain the lack of nasalised vowels and an alveolar articulation of what are categorised as the “cerebral” consonants (as opposed to the postalveolar articulation of western Bengal). The Bengali-Assamese script is an abugida, a script with letters for consonants, with diacritics for vowels, and in which an inherent vowel (\u0985 \u00f4) is assumed for consonants if no vowel is marked. These 39 consonants combine with vowels to create all Bengali words. According to Suniti Kumar Chatterji, dictionaries from the early 20th century attributed a little more than 50% of the Bengali vocabulary to native words (i.e., naturally modified Sanskrit words, corrupted forms of Sanskrit words, and loanwords non-Indo-European languages).<\/p>\n