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Old BengaliEarly Middle BengaliLater Middle BengaliModern Bengali↓Gaudi Apabhraṃśa ↑Future
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1204:Tughlaq invasions; many words influenced by the Arabic, Persian, and Turkic languages
Bengali is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language that originated from the Middle Indo-Aryan language in the 7th century.
After the conquest of Nadia in 1204 AD, Islamic rule began in Bengal, which influenced the Bengali language. The middle or late 14th century is marked as the end of Old Bengal and the beginning of Middle Bengal.
Modern Bengali dates back to 1800 AD. It marked the renaissance of Bengali, as well as incorporating borrowings from European languages. Significant changes in verbs and pronouns occurred during this period, which marked the contraction of most verbs and pronouns.
Old Bengal
The people of Bengal initially spoke a Prakrit language, which was known as Magadhi, or on the contrary, Gaudi. Later, it evolved into Old Bengali. Most Bengali-speaking people today consider Old Bengali to be almost unintelligible, although most of the words most commonly used in modern Bengali have their roots in Old Bengali.
"Within the Eastern Indic language family the history of the separation of Bangla from Odia, Assamese, and the languages of Bihar remains to be worked out carefully. Scholars do not yet agree on criteria for deciding if certain tenth century AD texts were in a Bangla already distinguishable from the other languages, or marked a stage at which Eastern Indic had not finished differentiating." (Dasgupta 2003:386–387)
Bibliography
Dasgupta, Probal (2003), "Bangla", in Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, pp. 386–428