Bengali (Bangla)

Bengali (Bangla)

Bengali, also called Bangla, is spoken by about 200 million people, mainly in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Bangla is written in Bengali script. Christianity came to Bengal with Portuguese missions in the sixteenth century. The Scriptures were first translated into Bengali by William Carey of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), and the Bible was first published in 1809. Most Bengali speaking Christians are Catholic with an evangelical Protestant minority.

Bible work in Bengali is done by the Bangladesh Bible Society, who produced a Bangla Common Language (BCL) Bible in 2001.