Bengali: where you can say “you” three different ways.
Can you imagine talking to people differently based on your relationship with them? If you’re a native English speaker, this might indicate using more flowery language for your superiors and using slang with your friends. However, some basic words stay the same, such as the word for “you”. It’s not like you change the word for “you” when you talk with your superiors, even if you might substitute “what’s good” with “I hope you are doing well.”
However, in some languages, even that word “you” is changed to be more formal. If you’ve studied Spanish in school, you may remember your teachers drilling the tú and usted conjugations into your head. However, some languages have even more forms than that.
One of those is Bengali.
If you’ve never heard of it, Bengali is a language spoken mainly in India and Bangladesh. It is the national language of Bangladesh and the second most-spoken language in India, mainly spoken in West Bengal, Tripura, and Assam. Have you heard of Calcutta? Calcutta operates in Bengali, since it is located in West Bengal.
Fun fact: in Bengali, we call Calcutta as Kolkata. The word Calcutta reminds me of fish cutlets, so I usually use Kolkata. My family is actually from the Kolkata region, but we moved to America, where I was born and brought up.
Anyway, back to my original point: In Bengali, there are three versions of the word “you,” used in different situations. At least, in West Bengal there are three forms; there may be other forms in different regional dialects. They are, in order from most formal to least formal: apni, tumi, and tui.
Apni is the most formal form of the three mentioned. It is used when talking to somebody you do not know or who is older than you. I personally rarely use this form because I am in the American Bengali diaspora, so almost every Bengali I come across is familiar to me. Not many Bengalis live in America, or at least, where I live. However, there have been situations where I’ve had to use it. For example, when I was handling registration for one of our festivals (that the non-profit cultural organization I’m a part of was hosting), I regularly had to use the possessive form of apni (Apnar ticket dao: give me your ticket). But if I had grown up in India, I would be using this form much more to talk to my teachers, store clerks, etc.
Next there's the tumi form. This is the form I personally use the most. Tumi is an informal form of “you.” In many dialects, this is the only informal form, but in West Bengal there's one that's even more informal. So this form is used for talking to people who you are familiar with but who are older or the same age as you. For example, when I talk with my mother, I use tumi. She’s my mother, so using apni would be extremely cold, but she’s also much older than me so I cannot use the more informal form, which is tui. I use tumi with all of my Bengali friends as well. Truth be told, I’d been using tumi for so long with my family that I only realized recently that there were two other forms of “you.” So I slip up sometimes and call somebody tumi when I should be using apni or tui.
As for the most informal, that would be tui, as I mentioned above. This is used for people who you are either very familiar with or who are younger than you. My mother uses tui with me, and I use tui with my younger brother. All my aunties and uncles also use tui with me. But I can only use tui with my younger brother because I’ve been using tumi with my other friends for so long (since I didn’t realize I could use tui until recently) that using tui now feels disrespectful. If I was in India though, I’d be using tui with my entire friend group!
The amazing thing about these different forms of “you” is that the verb conjugations change with each form you use. I suppose if you’re trying to learn the language it means there’s more to memorize, but if you have repeated exposure to hearing the different forms (like me for tumi and tui) it just comes naturally. However, I cannot conjugate apni for the life of me because I’ve heard it so little. My best friend, on the other hand, has never heard the tui conjugation in plural (she’s an only child, unlike me, so her mother never had a reason to use it) so whenever my mom uses it with us, she gets confused. It’s a little frustrating when I have to say something and I don’t know how to conjugate it, but if you live in a diaspora, you learn to live with gaps in your knowledge. It doesn’t hinder me anyway. And I don’t doubt that I’ll learn it as I get older and meet more Bengali people.
I know for a fact that this phenomenon of words in different formalities occurs in Spanish (like I referenced at the beginning of this article), and in Japanese it comes in the form of keigo, or polite speech. However, I wanted to focus on a language dear to me that is relatively unknown in the Western world. The Bengali culture and language are amazingly rich, colorful, and interesting, and I hope this piqued your interest a little, you learned something, or you look up more Bengali culture.
