Bengali/Sounds

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Bengali has 7 vowels, approximately 17 diphthongs, and approximately 30 consonants. Note that by vowels, diphthongs and consonants, we mean the spoken sounds or phones used in Bengali, not the letters or graphs found in the Bengali script.

[edit] Vowels

These are the seven vowels in Bengali:

Bengali letter	Transliteration	Audio
অ	ô
আ	a
ই	i
উ	u
এ	e
ও (sometimes অ, depending on context)	o
অ্যা (sometimes এ, depending on context)	â

In Bengali script, there are 11 designated "vowel" letters. These are: অ, আ, ই, ঈ, উ ,ঊ, ঋ, এ, ঐ, ও, ঔ। These vowel letters were initially adopted from the Devanagari script that is used to write Sanskrit and Hindi. Among these, ঈ and ঊ are supposed to denote elongated vowels, but that is rarely, if ever, the case in spoken Bengali. Although ঋ is a vowel in Sanskrit, it is pronounced in Bengali as "ri", a consonant-vowel combination. ঐ and ঔ are used to denote two diphthongs, although there are many more diphthongs in use in Bengali. There is no symbol for the vowel sound â (like the a in English bat) in the basic inventory of Bengali script, so the ligature অ্যা is used instead.

Moreover, depending on context, the graphs অ and এ can sound like o and â, respectively.