Bengali Hindus
Bengali Hindus () are an ethnic, linguistic, and religious population who make up the majority in the Indian state of West Bengal and Tripura. In Bangladesh they form the largest minority. They are Bengalis adherents of Hinduism, and are native to the Bengal region in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent. Bengali Hindus speak Bengali, which belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family and adhere to the Shakta and Vaishnava traditions of their native religion, Hinduism. There are significant numbers of Bengali-speaking Hindus in different Indian states.
Bengali phonology
The influence of Tibeto-Burman languages on the phonology is mostly on the Bengali spoken in east of the Padma River and relatively less in West and South Bengal as is seen through the lack of nasalized vowels in eastern Bengal but nasalization being present in Indian Bengali and an alveolar articulation for the otherwise postalveolar stops , , , and , resembling the equivalent phonemes in languages such as Thai and Lao. In the phonology of West and Southern Bengal, the distinction between and is clear and distinct like neighbouring Indian languages. But in the far-eastern variants where there is Tibeto-Burman influence, the distinction becomes less clear and sometimes becomes similar to the phonology of the Assamese ৰ rô. Unlike most languages of the region, Purbo Bengali dialects tend not to distinguish aspirated voiced stops , , , , and from their unaspirated equivalents, with some dialects treating them as allophones of each other and other dialects replacing the former with the latter completely. Some variants of Bengali, particularly Chittagonian and Chakma Bengali, have contrastive tone; differences in the pitch of the speaker's voice can distinguish words. There is also a distinction between and in many northern Bangladeshi dialects. representing the uncommon to Bengali sound whereas the standard used for both letters in most other dialects.