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Sylheti

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is an Indo-European language spoken in the Barak Valley region of northeast Bangladesh and southeast Assam. It has commonly been regarded as a dialect of Bengali, with which it shares a high proportion of vocabulary (Spratt and Spratt report 70% shared vocabulary, while Chalmers reports at least 80%). However, even words counted as the same (e.g. the Sylheti haf and aiz vs. the corresponding Standard Bengali shap, aj) are pronounced diffrently as to make Sylhet not inherently intelligible with Bengali. Up to the end of British rule and the Partition of India in 1947, the religious mix of the Sylhet region, then part of Assam, was approximately equally split between Hindus and Muslims, but since then the part of the Sylhet region remained in Bangladesh is now over 80% Muslim. Muslims speak a significantly different form of Sylheti to Hindus. Firstly, Muslims use a large proportion of words and phrases borrowed from Persian and Arabic, and secondly, pronunciation is often different such as the k which Muslims usually pronounce as a rough fricative but with Hindus is usually hard. The Sylheti language is related to both Assamese and Bengali, but is distinct from both. Modern Sylheti appears to be identical to the language described by Grierson (1928) under the name Bengali of Cachar and listed as language number 548; Cachar was the name of the region of Assam bordering Sylhet District to the east, now referred to as the Barak Valley. Sylheti shares many features of rural East Bengali dialects generally, and retains many words and forms which in Standard Bengali are restricted to poetry or are obsolete.
Source : DBpedia

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This page is providing structured data for the language Sylheti.
Following BCP 47 the recommended tag for this language is syl.

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