Dash, Niladri Sekhar (2015) A Descriptive Study of Bengali Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 255-275 255 Chapter 9 Lexical Naturalization in Bengali Niladri Sekhar Dash Linguistic Research Unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India Email: ns_dash@yahoo.com 9.1 Introduction In this chapter, I have made a systematic corpus-based study to show how the vocabulary of the modern Bengali language is infested with a large number of new English words and terms that have recently crept into the Bengali vocabulary to make room for new concepts, items, and ideas. This study can also show these newly borrowed words and terms have made existing equivalent words and terms of Bengali functionally redundant. I have made an empirical attempt to explore how the vocabulary of the present Bengali language is undergoing linguistic metamorphosis at the lexical level by drawing heavily from the English vocabulary as a result of several linguistic and extralinguistic factors, and how new English general words as well as scientific and technical terms are being incorporated into the Bengali language through various methods of naturalization. I have presented here some of the findings, which I have obtained from my analysis of a Bengali corpus of prose texts (1981-1995) as well as from a lexical database manually compiled from various types of modern Bengali prose texts. In a systematic way I have shown how naturalization is taking place in Bengali vocabulary with complex operation of linguistic processes such as adoption [1] and adaptation [2] at lexical, phonological, and morphological levels. This pilot study plants the seeds for further investigation into this area with some large databases compiled from heterogeneous texts of the modern Bengali language.