Bengali

Bengali belongs to the Aryan or Indo-Iranian sub-branch, of the Indo-European family of languages. Its direct ancestor is a form of Prakrit or Middle Indo-Aryan which descended from Sanskrit. Sanskrit was the spoken, as well as the literary language of Aryandom until about 500 B.C. After this point it remained dominant as a literary language, but began to split into several distinct spoken languages, including Bengali which originated by the middle of the tenth century. Bengali, with 100 million speakers in Bangladesh, and over 70 million speakers in India, is one of the top five languages of the world in terms of number of speakers. It is written in a script which, like all other Indian scripts, originated from Brahmi alphabet of the Asokan inscriptions.

Evolution of Bengali Language and Script
The Bengali Language

Information on writing systems:

Geocities.com: Brahmi descended scripts
omniglot.com

Independent Study Courses Available at UCSD:

• Conversational Bengali, LIDS 19
    Edward Dimock, Introduction to Bengali (Tape) 

Other Local Resources:

UCSD International Center
Mingei museum of folk art
SD cultural events
International channel