With approximately 234 million native speakers and another 39 million as second language speakers as of 2017, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world. Bengali ( / b ɛ n ˈ ɡ ɔː l i/ ben- GAW-lee), generally known by its endonym Bangla ( বাংলা, Bengali pronunciation: ), is an Indo-Aryan language native to the Bengal region of South Asia.
