摘要：As a social phenomenon, language is frequently influenced by different social codes, orders, and customs of society. Apart from the structural variety of language, many social dimensions of languages, develop over the time, occur. Nowadays Bengali- a rich language of south Asia- is encountering such social dimensional changes, as it interacts with its complex socio-cultural components. More elaborately, Bengali exhibits frequently different sociolinguistic characteristics such as code switching and code mixing, bilingualism and multilingualism, social dialect and dialectal free variation, language maintenance and language shift. This paper provides a brief description of sociolinguistic terms mentioned above from the point of view of the recent changes in Bengali. Key words : speech community, sociolect, code switching code mixing, code shifting, language shift DOI: 10.3329/dujl.v1i2.3719 The Dhaka University Jaurnal of Linguistics : Vol. 1 No.2 Augus, 2008 Page: 115-124
