Urdu speakers

[Rajarshi Banerjee]

I would say about half of the Bengali Muslims speak the eastern dialect of
Hindustani ( I think it is called Sharqi but am not sure), while the other
half (the converts) speak Bengali.
Otherwise some figures are given at the Ethnologue database at
<http://www.sil.org/ethnologue> but the estimate of 50-50 Urdu-Bengali is
still the best.
Samar

I have never come across a single bangladeshi who can speak
hindi/urdu/hindustani or sharqi or whatever you may want to call it. I am
not sure why you refer to the bengalis as converts, all muslims in south
asia are converts including ones in pakistan. Conversion must have taken
place pretty early in east bengal during sher shah suri's rule.

I flew on biman airlines, I think the announcments were in bengali and
english only
>

Whatever happened to the urdu speakers. Is the arabic script ever used? Did
retaliatory genocide and govt policy suppress use of urdu dialects?

RB