East Bengal was a non-contiguous province of the Dominion of Pakistan. Geographically eastern part of the Bengal region, East Bengal existed from 1947 until 1955, when it was renamed East Pakistan. Today, the area is an independent country, Bangladesh. With its coastline on the Bay of Bengal, it bordered India and Burma. It was located close to, but did not share a border with, Nepal, Tibet, the Kingdom of Bhutan and the Kingdom of Sikkim. Its capital was Dacca, now known as Dhaka.

Bengali, also known by its endonym Bangla, is an Indo-Aryan language from the Indo-European language family native to the Bengal region of South Asia. With approximately 240 million native speakers and another 41 million as second language speakers as of 2021, Bengali is the sixth most spoken native language and the seventh most spoken language by the total number of speakers in the world. It is the fifth most spoken Indo-European language.