Nowadays Bengali is the official language of Bangladesh, the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura, the Barak Valley, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and honorarily (owing to the aid of UN peacekeepers from Bangladesh) in Sierra Leone. The language is regulated by academies in Dhaka and Kolkata, which hold near-equal sway in development.

Even decades after the death of master storyteller, poet, and songwriter Rabindranath Tagore, a noted diglossia exists between Bengali's literary standard (or shadhubhasha) and its colloquial standard (or cholitobhasha), the former retaining more archaic word forms and the latter capitulating to speech impediments and increased borrowings from English outside of those obtained in the era of the British Raj.