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.
Shadhu-bhasha
This Sanskritised form of Bengali is notable for its variations in verb forms and the vocabulary which is mainly composed of Sanskrit or tatsama words. It was mainly a vocabulary making it easier for literary works in Sanskrit to be translated and understood at that time. Notable among them was Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, who standardised the alphabets and paved the path for literary works. The colloquial usage of Bengali consisted mostly of its Pali base, indigenous Austroasiatic/Tibeto-Burman/Dravidian "deshi", Persian and Arabic words embedded into the vocabulary. As a result, the Hindu pundits chose the path of sanskritisation to make a "pure" language which was not to be used in day to day conversation but would be used as a modern representative of classical languages into which the works of Sanskrit literature can be translated. This shifted Bengali from its Pali roots towards Sanskrit. This in turn increased the commonality in Bengali vocabulary with other Indo-Aryan languages, such as Hindi and Urdu.