Bengal or endonym Bangla is a historical geographical, ethnolinguistic and cultural term referring to a region in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal. The region of Bengal proper is divided between modern-day sovereign nation of Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal.

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.