ABSTRACT
Bengali is the mother tongue of most of the people living in Bangladesh and West Bengal (WB), India. The WB people speak typical Calcatian Bengali (kolkatar Bhasha/Bangla) which is officially called Standard Colloquial Bengali (SCB), although it has four regional varieties. Scholars have identified such varieties as separate dialects spreading from the Orissa–Midnapore border and the Sundarbans in the south up to the Kamrupi and Darjeeling varieties in the North. On the other hand, the people of Bangladesh speak in a dialect called the East Bengali dialect (EBD), as named by Grierson (1903). However, there was a time when SCB was common to the Bengali speaking population of both the countries. Since 1971, the Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Dacca (now Dhaka) people have been experiencing the expansion of neo-linguistic cultures in their respective zones indicating the development of a dia-standard within the same language. The present chapter argues that under the given circumstances, there are increasing reasons for a change in language use and its maintenance in the direction not of the uni-standard, but of a dia-standard, uniting the traditional and prestigious SCB with a new variety of expressions.
