How can I use Bengali script in an English document?

Question

I am a Linguist and I need to use Bengali script inside an English article which is predominantly English. I have found many answers but they only seem to be useful when the whole document is in Bengali. I should mention that I use the following:

Tex-editor: Texmaker

Library: MikTex

Package: Tipa

Compiler: LuaLatex

Let me describe the problem: for example when I start my document as:

\documentclass[10pt,a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{tipa}

\begin{document}

x, y, z whatever.... 

আমি

\end{document}

It doesn't show any error and the pdf looks fine except the Bengali letters just disappear.

Please help.

Answer 1

Using the polyglossia package, it works quite well in XeLaTeX:

\documentclass[preview, margin=0.5cm]{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage{english}
\setotherlanguage{bengali}
% Replace this with whatever font you're using
\newfontfamily\bengalifont[Script=Bengali]{Akaash}
\title{\textbengali{ইংরেজি} and Bengali}
\begin{document}
\maketitle

First English, \textbengali{তারপর বাংলা}

\end{document}

The output looks like this.

(As per this answer, I installed the Akaash font from this website. You can substitute in another font if you prefer.)

Note, however, that if I compile with LuaLaTeX, vowels are not handled correctly: the first word of the title should be ইংরেজি, but instead we have this, which is wrong:

Unfortunately, I don't (yet) know of a workaround in LuaLaTeX.

Answer 2

I don't know anything about Bengali so it took me a while to figure out a font I could use for this. However, I get similar output to Arun Debray when compiling with LuaLaTeX

which I gather is wrong, whereas XeLaTeX produces

which I gather is less wrong.

Since this uses an entirely different font, I guess that LuaLaTeX cannot cope properly with this script at the moment. (Or it needs some additional something which XeLaTeX can do without.)

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage{geometry,fontspec,polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage[variant=british]{english}
\setotherlanguage{bengali}
\newfontfamily\bengalifont{Noto Sans Bengali}[Script=Bengali]
\begin{document}
x, y, z whatever\dots

\begin{bengali}
  আমি
\end{bengali}
\end{document}

The font I used offers two versions of Bengali script

beng            Bengali
bng2            Bengali v.2

However, I am not sure how to enable the second one to compare. I guess this could be done as a raw font feature, but perhaps there is a better option for this, which would still have it correctly recognised as a script?