Bong (term)
Bong is a neologism that originated in cosmopolitan India in the 1980s as a slightly pejorative exonym for the educated middle-class Bengalis from the Indian state of West Bengal. In the 21st century, the term became a self-appellation of pride through the use of satire and self-reflexive irony by the Bengali blogging community, which came to stand for West Bengalis as a whole. Bong has been noted as a word of Indian English, used in the Indian newspapers. Origin In the 1970s, the term was in the National Defence Academy to denote the people from West Bengal. The usage of Bong as an ethnic quip has been noted in the India Today in 1989. Sociologist Prasanta Roy has noted that the word was used in New Delhi in the 1990s. According to lexicographer Ashoke Mukhopadhyay, Bong is a distortion of the word Bengali that originated among the NRIs. Writer Nabarun Bhattacharya believed that the term originated either in the IITs or some other pan-Indian educational institutes. According to a 1999 report in The Indian Express, the gradual extinction of Bengali language and culture and the growing cosmopolitanism in Kolkata have resulted in Bengalis called Bongs by the non-Bengalis. According to