Ask a visitor to Bangladesh to listen carefully in a Chittagong market, on a bus heading south towards Cox's Bazar, or in a tea stall in the old city, and they may notice something puzzling. The speech around them is clearly related to Bengali, and yet much of it does not resolve into familiar Bengali words. A speaker from Dhaka may catch the thread of a conversation, lose it, and catch it again. A Chittagonian speaker, meanwhile, may switch with practised ease into standard Bengali when speaking to an outsider, and then switch back the moment the outsider leaves. That everyday experience of closeness and distance sits at the heart of a long-running question: is Chittagonian, also called Chatgaiya, a dialect of Bengali, or a language in its own right?
There is no single answer that satisfies everyone, and that disagreement is itself part of the story. What is not in dispute is that Chittagonian is a living, widely spoken tongue with its own sounds, grammar and vocabulary, shaped by the same port history that shaped the city itself.
How Many People Speak It, and Where
Chittagonian is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in parts of greater Chittagong in Bangladesh, principally in Chittagong and Cox's Bazar districts, and also in Rangamati, Bandarban and Khagrachhari districts, where people from Chittagong district have migrated. It is also spoken by expatriate and second-generation Chittagonian communities abroad, including in the United States and other countries. Estimates of speaker numbers vary with the source and the date: one widely cited estimate from 2006 puts the figure at 13 million speakers, principally in Bangladesh, while other accounts give 14 million. The difference is a reminder that counting speakers of a language without official status is an estimate, not a census category, but on either figure Chittagonian is spoken by a population comparable to that of many recognised national languages.
Chittagonian belongs to the Bengali-Assamese sub-branch of the Eastern group of Indo-Aryan languages, within the wider Indo-European family. It is derived through an Eastern Middle Indo-Aryan from Old Indo-Aryan. The linguist George Grierson, in his early twentieth-century survey, grouped the dialects of Chittagong under Southeastern Bengali, alongside the dialects of Noakhali and Akyab. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, writing in 1926, placed Chittagonian in the eastern Vangiya group of Magadhi Prakrit and noted that all Bengali dialects were independent of each other and did not emanate from the literary Bengali called sadhu bhasha. That early classification already hints at the complexity: Chittagonian is related to Bengali, but its history is not simply a story of standard Bengali decaying at the edges.
Why Speakers and Outsiders Hear It Differently
The most commonly cited test for whether two forms of speech are dialects or languages is mutual intelligibility: can speakers of one understand speakers of the other without special learning? On this test, Chittagonian presents an asymmetrical picture. It is described as not inherently intelligible to other varieties of Bengali, although it is variously considered a nonstandard Bengali dialect. At the same time, Chittagonian speakers can understand other regional Bengali dialects very well. That asymmetry is familiar to many Chittagonians themselves: they grow up hearing standard Bengali in school, on television and in official life, so they understand it, while a Bengali speaker from elsewhere, without that exposure, may struggle to follow rapid Chittagonian.
The differences are not only a matter of accent. Chittagonian has its own grammar, phonology and vocabulary. Its grammar is similar to that of standard Bengali, with significant variations in inflectional morphology, the prefixes, suffixes and particles that shape words, and some variation in word order. Like related languages of the eastern subcontinent, Chittagonian is a head-final language, with a subject-object-verb basic word order. One of its most discussed grammatical features is preverbal negation. In standard Bengali, the negative particle follows the verb, as in "Ami jabo na", meaning "I will not go". In Chittagonian, the negative particle precedes the verb: "Añi no zeiyum". The same pattern is found in Assamese, but not in standard Bengali, and linguists who argue for Chittagonian as a separate language often point to this kind of systematic grammatical difference, rather than to a handful of unusual words.
Chittagonian is also broadly mutually intelligible with the Rohingya language, and to a lesser extent with Noakhali and Chakma, which reflects the geography of the southeastern coast and its historical connections across what is now the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. That pattern of intelligibility, closer to some neighbours than to standard Bengali, is another reason why a simple label of "dialect of Bengali" feels incomplete to many speakers and researchers.
A Language or a Dialect? The Scholarly Debate
Scholars have taken different positions, and the debate has been running for decades. Moniruzzaman, writing in 2007, argued that on the basis of the phonology, morphology and syntax of the Chittagong dialect, it is one of the dialects of Bengali. Hoque, writing in 2016, took a similar position. On the other side, literary expert Abdul Karim Sahitya Bisharad termed Chittagonian a separate and distinct language instead of a dialect, and Muhammad Enamul Haq did so too, according to accounts of the debate. Ahmad, writing in 2013, argued that, like Oriya, Assamese and Maithili, Chittagonian is not a dialect of Bengali, and claimed that its history is older than that of Bengali, pointing to similarities between words in the Caryapada, the early medieval mystical songs, and modern Chittagonian words, and to the preverbal negative marker found in Caryapada verses.
That last claim, that Chittagonian is older than Bengali, is contested and should be treated as one scholar's argument rather than settled fact. What the debate as a whole shows, however, is that the question cannot be settled by vocabulary alone. Alam, writing in 2011, stated that Chittagonian is the most distinct from Bengali in terms of pronunciation, sentence structure and the order of parts of speech, and attempted to determine whether it originated from an entirely different language or was a skewed form of Bengali. He also noted that even the majority of educated Chittagong residents cannot speak Bengali correctly, or do so with a noticeable accent, because Chittagonian shares so little, in linguistic terms, with standard Bengali. Other scholars, including Abdul Karim, Enamul Haq and Abul Fazal, viewed Chittagonian as having stemmed from standard Bengali, but could not explain the derivation history of how such a degree of difference arose, and pointed to interaction between the Arakanese language and the Bengali spoken in Chittagong, given Chittagong's position bordering the Arakan kingdom.
In practical terms, the classification matters less than the status. Chittagonian has its own ISO 639-3 code, ctg, and is listed in linguistic databases as a distinct entity. It is also described in some accounts as one of the largest linguistic communities in the world without official language recognition. It is not known to be taught in schools as a language in its own right, and few Chittagonian speakers are literate in their language in the sense of writing it regularly; they tend to write in Bengali instead, even though Chittagonian can be written with the Bengali alphabet, and also with Arabic and Latin alphabets.
Words Carried In by Ships
If grammar shows how Chittagonian works, vocabulary shows where it has been. Most of its vocabulary is derived from Sanskrit and Pali roots, like Bengali, but it includes a significant number of imported words from Arabic, Persian and Turkish, as well as, to a lesser extent, Portuguese, and English words are widely used in spoken Chittagonian, as in almost all neighbouring languages, as a result of the legacy of the British Empire. One account notes that the contribution of Arabic, Persian and Turkish words to Chittagonian is far greater than that to standard Bengali, because of Chittagong's history as a port city open to traders from Arabia, Persia and Turkey since ancient times, who brought vocabulary that was integrated into Chittagonian, and because Chittagonians were among the first to convert to Islam and were further influenced by Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary as the languages of Muslim traders of the time.
The Portuguese layer is smaller but vivid, and it is shared with Bengali more broadly. Words of Portuguese origin in Bengali include almari, a cupboard, from armário; chabi, a key, from chave; janala, a window, from janela; balti, a bucket, from balde; and girja, a church, from igreja. Research on Chittagonian notes a larger proportion of Portuguese loanwords for Chittagonian speakers than for standard Bengali speakers, reflecting the period when Chittagong was under Portuguese administration and influence. A Dhaka Tribune account adds a further Chittagonian detail: Chittagonian women still refer to the sari-related garments as saya and kamis, Portuguese words meaning skirt and shirt. Food words tell a similar story of arrival by sea, with pineapple, cashew, papaya and guava among the crops associated with Portuguese introduction from their colonies, even if the precise route of each word into Chittagonian speech is a matter for specialist study rather than folklore.
A Living Tongue, Not a Museum Piece
Chittagonian is not only a subject for linguists. There are many songs in Chittagonian, and it is used to some extent on television and radio. Platforms dedicated to preserving and promoting the language through research and educational resources have emerged, and Chittagonian has a rich oral literature, which linguists who argue for its status as a language often cite as evidence that it is more than a mere dialect. At the same time, its speakers identify with Bengali culture and the standard Bengali language, and that dual identity is not a contradiction. A person can be proudly Chittagonian in speech at home and in the market, and proudly Bengali in national and literary life, switching between the two as the situation requires.
For a visitor to Chittagong, the practical lesson is simple. Do not assume that the speech you hear is simply Bengali spoken badly, or with a heavy accent. It is a system with its own rules, its own history, and its own sense of belonging. Listen for the negative before the verb, for the words that arrived with Arab, Persian, Turkish and Portuguese traders, and for the ease with which speakers move between Chatgaiya and standard Bengali. The language, like the port, was made by centuries of arrivals, and it continues to be remade every day by the people who speak it.