EkGuru › Answers › How is Hindi different from Punjabi and Bengali?
| Language | Script | |---|---| | Hindi | Devanagari देवनागरी | | Punjabi (India) | Gurmukhi ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ | | Punjabi (Pakistan) | Shahmukhi, Perso-Arabic | | Bengali | Bengali–Assamese বাংলা |
Devanagari and Bengali script share an ancestor and both hang letters from a horizontal line, which is why they look related at a glance.
Punjabi is tonal — pitch changes meaning, which is unusual in this family and hard for Hindi speakers.
Bengali has no grammatical gender at all. No masculine and feminine nouns, no changing verb endings. For an English speaker that removes the single hardest part of Hindi. Bengali instead has an elaborate system of verb forms for politeness levels.
By speakers and reach, Hindi — around 600 million, and it functions as a link language across north India. Bengali is next at roughly 265 million and gives you Bangladesh as well as West Bengal. Punjabi is the most useful of the three in the UK and Canada, where the diaspora is large.
Some. Shared Sanskrit vocabulary and a shared grammatical shape mean the second Indo-Aryan language is noticeably easier than the first. But it is a real second language, not a dialect you can guess your way into.
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