Bengali and Eastern Hindi

Inspired by Language Log (and at times, being disappointed with its content too) I have started to log my own observations in South Asian languages.

My first observation is a simple one. I remember from my times in Varanasi, that the local dialects used "man karna" a lot. man kare to kar lo, man nahin kar rahaa. I was listening to an excerpt from Sunil Gangopadhyaya's ShreshTha galpa. I found that the same phrase is used a lot in Bangla too. The dialects in Bihar are quite similar to Bangla, but I wasn't aware that effects are reflected into far as Varanasi. The haven't heard this phrase being used in most of the khadi boli dialects and frankly not very frequently in literature either.

Urdu speakers hardly seem to use this phrase. I might theorize that man is not suited to Islamic metaphysics, but that is merely a speculation even though man is a Sanskrit word and has not much in common with Persian counterparts either.

Of course, usually one would find the official Hindi using an excessive lot of loan words from Bengali. In the excerpt itself, words like 'vastutaH','vyApAr','jal','nadi teere' that I hear in spoken bangla a lot, are reserved for official Hindi and are never used by Hindi speakers in their regular language (spoken Hindi would be replete with Urdu equivalents instead).