Jalaluddin Muhammad Shah was a 15th-century Sultan of Bengal and an important figure in medieval Bengali history. Born a Hindu to his aristocratic father Raja Ganesha, the patriarch of the Ganesha dynasty, he assumed the throne of Bengal after a coup which overthrew the Ilyas Shahi dynasty. He converted to Islam and ruled the Bengal Sultanate for 16 years. As a Muslim king, he brought Arakan under Bengali suzerainty and consolidated the kingdom's domestic administrative centres. He pursued relations with the Timurid Empire, Mamluk Egypt and Ming China. Bengal grew in wealth and population during his reign. He also combined Bengali and Islamic architecture.

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.