Bengali

Bengali is one of only two languages (English is the other) with a bundled dictionary, bundled emoji keywords, and a purpose-built phonetic engine, and it ships three layouts: Avro phonetic, Probhat, and Jatiya. Adding Bengali turns on Avro; the other two are a tap away on its own screen. A phone whose Android language list already includes Bangla gets it enabled from the first run. Type romanized Bengali and the keyboard converts it to script as you go, or pick one of two fixed Bengali keyboards if you’d rather type the script directly.

Screenshot pending

Avro phonetic typing: "ami valo asi" commits as আমি ভালো আছি.

Typing phonetically with Avro

Avro phonetic is a fixed QWERTY grid underneath (every key is exactly where it is on the English layout) with a rule-based transliteration engine layered on top. Type a romanized syllable and it renders in Bengali script directly in the composing text, no separate conversion step: “ami” becomes আমি, “kolokata” becomes কলকাতা, “dhorrmo” becomes ধর্ম. The engine handles conjuncts, reph, khanda-ta, and the vowel/consonant context that decides whether a vowel is a standalone letter or a kar sign automatically, so you type the sounds and don’t have to think about the script mechanics.

Where it goes further than a plain transliterator is lenient spelling. Bengali speakers write the same word several different ways in Latin letters (আছি comes out as “asi”, “achi”, or “achhi” depending on the person), and Avro accepts all of them. This isn’t a hardcoded list of corrections: both your romanized input and every word in the Bengali dictionary are folded to a lenient phonetic key where confusable sounds collapse (স/শ/ষ/ছ/চ all fold to the same sound, aspiration like “kh” or “bh” drops to “k”/“b”, and so on), so “asi”, “achi”, and “achhi” all land on the same key as আছি. Whichever dictionary word sharing that key is used more often becomes what commits when you hit space, which is why “ami valo asi” becomes আমি ভালো আছি rather than the more literal আমি ভালো আসি.

That correction only steps in when a dictionary word is clearly more common than the literal transliteration; a near-tie never overrides what the composing text already showed you. “holO” transliterates to হলো, and although হল is a separate, valid dictionary word, it doesn’t steal the commit because the two are close enough in frequency that swapping would look like a bug, not a correction. The literal transliteration is always in the suggestion strip as a fallback either way, so you can pick it if the substitution guesses wrong.

Note

This substitution isn’t part of autocorrect and isn’t controlled by the autocorrect toggle. Avro’s phonetic commit runs regardless of whether Autocorrect is on or off. There’s no separate switch to turn it off.

A few more of the rules worth knowing:

You type	You get	Why
valo or bhalo	ভাল	“bh” and “v” both fold to the “b” sound
valO	ভালো	lowercase “o” is the inherent vowel and writes nothing; only capital “O” is ও/ো
kolokata	কলকাতা	the explicit “o” between l and k breaks the conjunct that kolkata (no vowel between them) would form
bangla / bangali	বাংলা / বাঙালি	ং joins nothing; before a vowel it is ঙ, which can carry the syllable
swasthyo	স্বাস্থ্য	“w” after a consonant is a ব-ফলা join
wasi	ওয়াসি	“w” anywhere else is ও
panjabi	পাঞ্জাবি	“n” before “j” is ঞ
hoThaTH, hoThat + a trailing backquote, or hoThat,,	হঠাৎ	TH, a backquote or a trailing hasant all spell khanda-ta (ৎ)
shyam	শ্যাম	“y” after a consonant is a য-ফলা join
meye	মেয়ে	“y” elsewhere is য়, not a join
ggan	জ্ঞান	gg is the জ্ঞ conjunct
Bangla	বাংলা	a capital that spells nothing of its own reads as its lowercase self
$ / 123	৳ / ১২৩	currency and digits convert too
. / ..	। / .	a single dot is দাঁড়ি; two dots is a literal period

Both of Avro’s spellings for the marks work, and so do the ones Ridmik uses: ঁ is ^ or qq/cb, ঃ is : or HH, ৎ is t plus a backquote or TH, and the hasant is ,, or hs. The hs form only fires after a consonant, where a hasant can actually go, so it never eats the h and s of a name like ahsan.

Spellings the rules can’t reach

Some words just aren’t spelled the way they sound, so a list of them is checked before the phonetic engine runs. A match there always wins over whatever the transliterator would have produced. Two kinds of word need this:

• English loanwords. “Keyboard” is written কিবোর্ড and “chair” চেয়ার by convention, not by sound. Left to the rules, “table” would come out তাবলে instead of টেবিল. About 2,300 of these are listed by hand.
• Banglish as people actually type it. Chat spelling drops vowels wholesale, and no phonetic rule can put back a vowel that was never typed. tmr is তোমার, amk is আমাকে, trpr is তারপর. Colloquial and regional inflections like boltiso (বলতিসো) are in the same list, which covers about 12,000 spellings drawn from a corpus of real Bengali chat.

you type	you get	without the list
tmr	তোমার	ত্ম্র
amk	আমাকে	আম্ক
tmi	তুমি	টমি
table	টেবিল	তাবলে

A listed spelling shows up in the composing text as soon as you finish typing it, not when you hit space: tmr reads তোমার at the r. That’s the same answer the space would have committed, so nothing changes under you at the last moment.

You can switch this off per language if you’d rather have the letter-for-letter reading (see Spellings under Options below). See Downloadable dictionaries for how Bengali’s dictionary and these lists fit into suggestions generally.

Choosing a layout: Avro, Probhat, or Jatiya

Bengali ships three layouts. A fresh install turns on one of them, Avro, and only if your phone’s own language list has Bangla in it: what starts enabled is read off the phone rather than fixed (see What ships). Turn the other two on whenever you want them, from Bangla’s own screen under Languages. The exception is a keyboard you enabled from Android’s settings and typed on without ever opening the app: the setup wizard never ran, so the built-in fallback stands and all three Bengali layouts are on alongside English QWERTY.

• Avro phonetic — the QWERTY grid described above; the default layout when you add Bengali by searching for it.
• প্রভাত (Probhat) — the fixed Bengali layout popular on Linux, following the standard desktop keymap as shipped by Avro Keyboard and OpenBangla. You type Bengali letters directly; nothing is transliterated.
• জাতীয় (National / Jatiya) — the Bangladesh national standard fixed layout, also following its desktop keymap.

Screenshot pending

প্রভাত (Probhat) active: Bengali letters typed directly, no phonetic conversion.

On Probhat, shift mostly gives you the aspirated partner of a consonant (দ→ধ, ট→ঠ, গ→ঘ, ক→খ) but not uniformly: some shift pairs are vowel-length pairs (ি→ই, ু→উ, ী→ঈ) and a few are unrelated letters that just share a key for space reasons (র→ড়, ন→ণ, স→ষ). The 10th key on the home row carries ে with ো on shift and ৈ/ৌ on long-press. A handful of less common marks (ৎ, ঞ, ঁ, ৃ, ৗ, ঽ) live as long-press alternates on a phonetically related key rather than getting a dedicated slot.

Jatiya’s letter keys also match its desktop layout; independent vowels that sit on a desktop AltGr key are reached here as long-press on their matching kar sign instead: long-press ু for উ or ঊ, long-press ি for ই or ঈ, and so on.

All three layouts type দাঁড়ি (।) from the key next to the spacebar rather than a full stop, with the ASCII . moved to that key’s long-press for numbers, file names and web addresses.

Both fixed layouts share the same cluster-editing behavior as Avro (see Editing conjuncts and clusters below), and the same font choice applies across all three (see Options). Switching between them works exactly like switching between any other enabled layouts: spacebar swipe, hold-drag picker, or the 🌐 key. See Switching languages for the full mechanics.

Editing conjuncts and clusters

Bengali script builds conjuncts (যুক্তবর্ণ) by joining consonants with a hasant (্): ক্ষ, স্ত্রী, জ্ঞ. By default, backspace over already-typed Bengali text removes one character at a time, which can leave a half-formed cluster on screen: জ্ঞ with one backspace becomes জ্, not জ.

WM Keyboard›Languages›Bangla›Clusters›Conjunct-aware backspace

Turning on Conjunct-aware backspace changes this: a whole conjunct cluster is deleted in a single press instead. স্ত্রী (a triple conjunct) disappears as one unit, ক্ষ as one unit, and a bare trailing hasant with nothing joined to it yet still deletes alone. The setting is off by default, and it applies to committed Bengali text across all three Bengali layouts (Avro, Probhat, and Jatiya alike) since they share the same cluster logic. It only affects text already committed to the field; deleting through your still-composing Avro romanization always removes one Latin character per press.

This toggle isn’t Bengali-exclusive: every language on a cluster-forming script gets its own copy of it (Devanagari, Tamil, Khmer and others work the same way). It’s set per language, so Bengali deleting whole conjuncts doesn’t commit you to Hindi doing the same.

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Conjunct-aware backspace, under the Bangla language's own Clusters group. Off by default.

Emoji search in Bangla

Bengali is one of the two languages (with English) whose search keywords are baked directly into the bundled emoji catalog, so searching emoji by their Bengali name works with nothing to download. A separate, larger downloadable keyword pack for Bengali is also available and stacks on top of the bundled set rather than replacing it. See Emoji search in your language and Emoji picker for how the ranking and language-merging work.

Options

WM Keyboard›Languages›বাংলা · Bangla

Open Bengali’s own screen from Languages in the app, or search for it from Add language:

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Bengali's language screen: layout toggles, numeral system, and dictionary/emoji status.

• Layouts — toggle Avro, Probhat, and Jatiya independently. At least one layout has to stay enabled somewhere across your whole keyboard, so you can’t switch off the last one from here.

• Numerals — two buttons, ০-৯ and 0-9, and Bengali digits win by default. Switch to 0-9 if you’d rather see Latin digits on the number row while typing Bengali. Where the digits you pick actually get typed (versus staying plain 0-9 in fields like phone numbers) is a separate, global setting under Layout & size → Numerals (default: native digits in text fields only, plain ASCII in number/phone/date/time fields).

• Also suggest from — pick other enabled languages to draw secondary suggestions from alongside Bengali.

• Dictionary — Bengali ships with a bundled dictionary, and a downloadable wordlist (about 451,000 words) is available for better suggestions; you can also import your own list. See Downloadable dictionaries for how sizes compare across languages.

• Emoji — download the larger Bengali emoji-keyword pack here (about 3,900 emoji named; the bundled catalog’s Bengali keywords already work without it). Downloads automatically if Download automatically is on.

• Spellings — WM Keyboard›Languages›Bangla›Spellings›Use known spellings, on by default. This is the list described above: it’s what makes table commit টেবিল rather than তাবলে, and tmr commit তোমার rather than ত্ম্র. Switch it off if you want the letter-for-letter reading instead, which is otherwise unreachable because the list outranks every other suggestion source. The setting is per language, so turning it off for Bengali says nothing about any other script.

• Clusters — WM Keyboard›Languages›Bangla›Clusters›Conjunct-aware backspace, covered above, off by default.

One more Bengali-relevant setting lives outside this screen:

• WM Keyboard›Appearance›Keyboard font›Bengali font — one of the per-script font sections, shown only while a Bengali-script language is enabled and separate from the general keyboard font. It applies to all three Bengali layouts at once (Avro, Probhat, Jatiya use the same choice), with several Bengali-focused Google Fonts to pick from plus your own imported font file — Bengali is the one script section that also takes an import.

Details & edge cases

“Banglish” is a different language, not a mode of this one. Selecting Banglish · Bangla (Romanized) from the language catalogue gives you a plain Latin QWERTY that stays in Latin script (it never converts to Bengali script) and pulls suggestions from its own romanized word list. That’s for people who want to text in Bengali using Latin letters and keep it that way. Avro, covered on this page, is the opposite: it converts what you type into Bengali script. Don’t confuse the two if you’re looking for one and land on the other in search results.

A few other languages share the Bengali script but aren’t the same language entry: Assamese, Bishnupriya Manipuri, and Sylheti all use Bengali-script layouts and Bengali-style numerals, but none of them bundle a dictionary the way Bengali does. If you’re typing one of those, look for it by its own name in the language catalogue rather than under Bengali.

The near-tie protection can feel inconsistent if you don’t know it’s there. Because a phonetic sibling only overrides the literal transliteration when it’s clearly more common, two words that are close in frequency (হলো vs. হল for “holO”) won’t always resolve the way you expect. This is deliberate, so the keyboard never silently swaps in a different word than what the composing preview showed you a moment before you hit space.

The layout editor shows both shift labels at once for Probhat and Jatiya keys, even though the real keyboard only shows one label per key state. Many fonts render a bare vowel sign (া, ি) as an orphaned, hard-to-read mark on its own, so the editor shows the base and shift labels side by side purely so you can tell keys apart while editing. This doesn’t change what’s drawn on the actual keyboard.

A rearranged Bengali layout still types Bengali. If you open Probhat, Jatiya, or Avro in the layout editor and move keys around, the result still draws suggestions from the Bengali dictionary and still composes Bengali script: a layout’s language comes from what it’s based on, not from its key arrangement.