Chittagong - Dialect

Dialect

Many Chittagong natives speak Chittagonian (চাটগাঁইয়া Chaţgaiã), an Indo-European language of the Eastern Indo-Aryan group. A large number of Arabic words and transformed Arabic words are used in this dialect. This is due to the arrival of traders and missionaries from the Arabian Peninsula hundreds of years ago. Many speakers consider their language to be a dialect of standard Bengali, the official language of Bangladesh. However, the two languages are not mutually intelligible, meaning that those who only know how to speak Standard Bengali will not understand Chittagonian speakers, and vice versa - normally the metric for languagehood among linguists. There is, however, a dialect continuum between Chittagonian and neighboring dialects of Bengali, meaning that speakers of each neighboring dialect can largely understand each other, while speakers of more distant dialects cannot. Chittagonian has approximately 14 million speakers. According to the status of Top 100 Languages by Population by Ethnologue, Chittagong ranked in 67th Language of the world.