The sound system of Bengali is fairly typical of Indo-Aryan languages.

Vowels
Bengali has 7 oral vowel phonemes: /i/, /e/, /æ/, /a/, /u/, /o/, //. Vowel length is not contrastive in Bengali.

Bengali has a wide variety of vowel combinations. Some are true diphthongs consisting of a vowel + semi-vowel occurring in one syllable, while others are vowel + vowel combinations occurring across two syllables.

Consonants
The consonant system of Bengali is characterized by the following.

• Contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated stops and affricates, including voiced ones, e.g., p—ph, t—th, k—kh, b—bh, d—dh, g—gh. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
• Contrast between and apical vs. retroflex stops and affricates, e.g., t—, d—. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth.
• The use of consonant clusters is extremely limited, even in borrowed words.

..	.	Bilabial	Apico-dental	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stops voiceless	unaspirated	p	t		..	k	.
	aspirated	ph	th	h	..	kh	..
Stops voiced	unaspirated	b	d		.	g	.
	aspirated	bh	dh	h	.	gh	.
Fricatives	voiceless	..	.	..			h
Affricates	unaspirated voiceless	....	c	.	..		..
	unaspirated voiced	...	j	.	..	.ŋ	..
	aspirated voiceless		ch
	aspirated voiced		jh
Nasals	...	m	n	.	...	..	..
Laterals	...	.....	l	.	....	..	..
Flap	...	.....	r		...	.	..

Stress
Stress in standard Bengali normally falls on the initial syllable of a word. The position of stress alone does not affect word meaning.

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Bengali is an inflected language, i.e., it uses prefixes and suffixes to mark grammatical relations and to form words. There are two styles of speaking which exist side-by- side:

• the high-style literary language which is more conservative in noun and verb morphology and which uses borrowings from Sanskrit more frequently;
• informal everyday language which is less conservative.

Nouns
Bengali nouns are characterized by the following:

• case (nominative, accusative, genitive, and locative-instrumental);
• there is no gender distinction;
• number (singular and plural); plural markers are added only to count nouns with animate or definite referents;
• animacy (marked in plural);
• definiteness (marked with post-posited in the singular, and -gula in the plural), e.g., chhatro'the student,' chhatro-ra 'the students,' juta- 'the shoe,' juta-gula 'the shoes.'
• Bengali uses numeral classifiers when counting nouns (similar to neighboring South Asian languages), e.g., panch-jon-chatro 'five-human classifier-students.'

Personal pronouns

• There are three persons: 1st, 2nd, 3rd;
• There is no gender distinction in the 3rd person;
• There are three degrees of proximity in the 3rd person (someone who is nearby, someone who is a little further away, and someone who is not present).

Verbs

• Bengali verbs agree with their subjects in person and status category.
• three persons (1st, 2nd, 3rd)
• three status categories in the 2nd person (despective, ordinary, honorific);
• two status categories in the 3rd person (ordinary, honorific);
• verb stems are derived from verbal monosyllabic or disyllabic verbal bases; markers combine to yield various mood/aspect/tense combinations;
• mood: indicative, imperative, conditional;
• two aspects: imperfective, perfective
• three tenses: present, past, future;
• there is a post-verbal negative particle.

Postpositions
Bengali typically uses postpositions, rather than prepositions. Postpositions require that the noun take a certain case.

Word order
The normal word order in Bengali sentences is Subject-Object-Verb. Adjectives and genitive constructions expressing possession precede nouns.