Bengali language should increase: Subhas

Barrackpore, (West Bengal) Jan 5 (UNI) West Bengal Sports Minister Subhas Chakrabarty today emphasised the need for increasing the usage of the Bengali language for both official and unofficial purposes to stop extinction.

''The German Language Committee had cautioned that the future of the Bengali language is bleak in the next century,'' Mr Chakrabarty said while speaking at the inaugural session of the 21st Panihati Book Fair at Sodepur near here this evening.

The Marxist leader warned, ''Bengali, which turned 4th international language, and is used by most population after Hun(Chinese), English and Spanish in 2003, may be extinguished in the coming centuries as reported by the German committee.'' The Minister said though Bengali has been recognised as the National Language of Bangladesh, official works of the state was still being maintained in English.

He said that as a minister he had received as many as 27,000 letters from people of various walks of life during last four years of which more than 20,600 were written in English.

UNI