The Bangla LIP is out, only 5½ months after the Bengali LIP!

THE WINDOWS 7 BANGLA LANGUAGE INTERFACE PACK IS LIVE!

Click here to download the Bangla Windows 7 LIP via the Microsoft.com Download Center.

Please note that the Bangla  Windows 7 LIP can only be installed on a system that runs an English client version of Windows 7.   It is available to download for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

The Bangla Windows 7 LIP is produced as part of the Local Language Program sponsored by Public Sector.

For the Bengali - India LIP, see 4 out the door, in both 32 & 64 (aka What Irish, Malay, Maltese & Bengali have in common), pubished at the end of July, last year.

A LITTLE BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON BANGLA

NUMBER OF SPEAKERS: 

150 million native speakers

NAME IN THE LANGUAGE ITSELF:

বাংলা

Bangla is sometimes referred to as Bengali, but is usually referred to as Bangla in Bangladesh where it is the official language.

It was also made an official language of Sierra Leone to honor the Bangladeshi peacekeeping force from the United Nations stationed there.

Bangla is spoken in the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, comprising Bangladesh (where it is spoken by about 150 million people) and the Indian state of West Bengal  (where it is spoken by 55 million people). With more than 200 million speakers it is the second most widely spoken language on the Indian subcontinent and among the 5 languages with the most native speakers worldwide.

INTERESTING FACTS:

• Bangla was the focus of the Bangla Language Movement (Bhasha Andolon) in what was then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).  It has its own holiday in Bangladesh, Language Movement Day. When from 1947 to 1971 Bangladesh and Pakistan were one nation (and were called East and West Pakistan), the central government tried to establish Urdu (spoken in West Pakistan) as sole national language. On February 21, 1952, protesting students and activists were fired upon by military and police in Dhaka University and dozens of people were killed. But the government had to give in after massive protests and gave Bangla official status. A monument, the Shaheed Minar (শহীদ মিনার), was erected in Dhaka to commemorate the “language martyrs”.
• In 1999, UNESCO decided to celebrate every 21 February as International Mother Language Day in recognition of the deaths of the students.

CLASSIFICATION:

Bangla belongs to the Eastern Indo-Aryan languages which are part of the Indo-European language family. Together with its closest relatives Assamese and Oriya, Bangla is the most eastern of this large language family.
The dialect of Bangla spoken in Bangladesh is different from the Bengali dialect spoken in India.

SCRIPT:

Bangla is written in the alphasyllabary called Bangla or Kutila-lipi which highly resembles the Devanagari script used for Sanskrit, Hindi or Nepali. The script consists of 12 vowel characters and 52 consonant characters. Like in all alphasyllabaries, or abugidas, characters for consonants have embedded vowels (or an extra diacritic showing that there is no vowel).

Note that Unicode encodes the script as an abugida.

Click here for more information on the Bangla language.

Perhaps in some future blog I may contrast the two LIPs, if people would perhaps find that interesting....

Enjoy!