Language

When the Mongolian empire collapsed, the majority of Mongols return to their beloved uplands. They settled back to their usual herding occupations and fought among themselves – forgetting about military conquests. Despite such isolation, the Mongol language was greatly enriched by its international past.

Mongolian (Mongol) is an Altaic language, related to the Turkish spoken in modern Turkey and other Turkic languages of central Asia like Kazakh and Tuvan.

It is the language of the majority Khakha Mongols. Together with its various dialects, it is spoken by some six million people in Mongolia, Russia and China.

There are four main dialects:

Oirat: Spoken in the western regions

Buryat: Spoken on the northern borders near Lake Baikal

Khalkha: The main dialect of Mongolia

Inner Mongolian dialects: Found among people living near Mongolia’s southern borders; corresponding to the dialects of similar adjacent tribes in Inner Mongolia.

The Mongol – Turkic vocabulary of the ancient nomads has expanded over the centuries to embrace Tibetan and Sanskrit expressions from Buddhism, Chinese and Manchu words introduced during the rule of the Qing dynasty, Russian technical and political terms from the period of Soviet influence, and, during the 1990s, English words that are part of the international language of commerce, science and computers.

Scripts

Mongol was put into writing 800 years ago on the orders of Genghis Khan, according to The Secret History of the Mongols. Mongolia has used a number of scripts throughout its history but the most used has been the Uighur Mongolian script. The Mongol script based on the Uighur alphabet, derived in turn from Sogdian. Uighur and Sogdian were both written horizontally and vertically, but Mongolian scrip is written is vertical columns from left to right. Its letters vary slightly in shape depending on whether they are at the beginning, the middle or the end of a word, as in Arabic. Over the centuries some new letters were introduced into the Mongol script, initially to reduce ambiguity, and later in order to incorporate certain Tibetan and Russian words. Attempts to reintroduce the Uighur Mongolian script widely in recent year have failed because it had been abandoned in favour of modified Russian Cyrillic – children were not taught to write it, books were not printed in the ‘old’ Mongolia writing, and during the 20th century only grandfathers and grandmothers kept it alive. Schools and other institutions though it would prove too disruptive to re-introduce, and there was also a shortage of suitable typesetting equipment. Most people tended to prefer a modified Cyrillic for everyday use. Khalka Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet with two extra letters.