Mongolian

Mongolian is the principal language of the Mongolic family, which arose on the Mongolian Plateau. Juha Janhunen divides the family into four branches: Dagur in Manchuria, Moghol in Afghanistan, possibly extinct, the Shirongolic languages of the Amdo region of Tibet, and the Common Mongolic branch to which Mongolian belongs. Mongolian is related to the extinct Khitan language. It was once thought to be related to Turkic, Tungusic, Korean and Japonic in an Altaic family, but most comparative linguists now see that view as obsolete; Clauson, Doerfer and Shcherbak proposed instead that Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic form a Sprachbund, languages grown alike through contact rather than common descent.

The language has older Mongolic forerunners. Chinese sources suggest that the earliest stages, the Xianbei and Wuhuan languages, may have used a native runic script; the Bugut inscription of 584 CE and the Inscription of Hüis Tolgoi of 604–620 CE appear to be the oldest substantial Mongolic or Para-Mongolic texts, and the Khitan large script adopted in 920 CE is an early Mongol, or by some accounts Para-Mongolic, script.

Mongolian itself is well attested from the 13th century. The earliest surviving text may be the Stele of Yisüngge, a report on sports cut in stone in the Mongolian script and most often dated 1224 or 1225, and Kirakos of Gandzak’s Mongolian-Armenian list of 55 words is the first manuscript evidence. The name Mongol may come from the Middle Chinese Mengwu or from an Old Mongolic word for “brave”.

Mongolian is known for its vowel harmony: all the vowels of a simple word, suffixes included, must come from the same group. The standard language has seven vowels, sorted into two groups by the position of the tongue root, with i neutral; suffixes change their vowels to fit, so the instrumental ending is -öör in örkhöör, “by a household”, but -aar in kharuulaar, “by a sentry”. In a first syllable a long vowel lasts about twice as long as a short one. Unusually, Mongolian has neither an ordinary l nor a k: in place of l it has a lateral fricative, a hissing l, and a syllable can end in up to three consonants.

The grammar is agglutinative and almost wholly suffixing. One word, baiguullagiinkh, builds on the root bai, “to be”, a causative suffix giving “to cause to be”, a suffix like English -ation and an ending meaning something belonging to it. Nouns have no gender and no articles but between seven and nine cases, and a definite direct object must take the accusative. Plurals take many forms, from khot, “city”, and khotuud, “cities”, to the irregular khün, “person”, and khümüüs, “people”.

The usual order is subject–object–verb, with the verb at the end and the other phrases free to move. Verbs mark voice, aspect, tense and evidentiality, how the speaker knows a thing, and there are five voices, among them the passive and the causative. Clauses are linked by converbs, verb forms that join one clause to the next.

In the Mongol Empire of the 13th and 14th centuries Middle Mongol was the language spoken across the empire, and the Yuan dynasty called Mongolian in Chinese Guoyu, the “national language”, a term other non-Han dynasties used for their own tongues. Today Mongolian is spoken by ethnic Mongols and related peoples in Mongolia and the surrounding parts of East, Central and North Asia, perhaps 5–6 million speakers across all its dialects. It is the official language of Mongolia, where nearly 3.6 million people spoke it in a 2014 estimate, and of China’s Inner Mongolia, where about 2.1 million speak it.

Across China only about half of the 5.8 million ethnic Mongols spoke the language in a 2005 estimate, and some, such as the Tumets, may have partly or wholly lost it. Its use in Inner Mongolia has risen and fallen: decline in the late Qing period, revival from 1947 to 1965, decline from 1966 to 1976, revival from 1977 to 1992 and decline again from 1995 to 2012. In 2020 the Chinese government required language and literature, politics and history to be taught in Mandarin in Mongolian-language schools, which caused widespread protests among Mongols that were quickly suppressed; from September 2023 Mandarin became the only language of instruction for all subjects.

More Mongolian speakers live in China than in Mongolia. Over two million of them speak the Khorchin dialect as their mother tongue, about as many as the Khalkha dialect group has in Mongolia.

From the 13th to the 15th centuries Mongolian was written in four scripts: the Uyghur Mongolian script, the ’Phags-pa script used in decrees, Chinese characters, in which The Secret History of the Mongols was recorded, and the Arabic script of dictionaries. Scholars call the language of these earliest texts Middle Mongol, and that of the documents in the Uyghur Mongolian script, which show features of their own, Preclassical Mongolian.

The script that carried most of this writing came from the Uyghurs. Genghis Khan adopted it in 1204, seeing the need to write his own people’s language, after members of the Uyghur elite brought into the Mongol confederation, among them Tata-tonga, Bilge Buqa, Kara Igach Buyruk and Mengsus, shared their knowledge of writing with the imperial clan. It underwent only minor changes afterwards.

Classical Mongolian, from the 17th to the 19th century, was a written language highly standardised in spelling and syntax and quite distinct from the Modern Mongolian that followed. Its most notable documents are the Mongolian Kangyur and Tengyur and several chronicles. In 1686 the Soyombo alphabet was created for Buddhist texts, and it preserves evidence of how early Classical Mongolian sounded. European scholars wrote early grammars and dictionaries of the language, among them Abel Rémusat in Paris in 1820, Isaak Jakob Schmidt in St Petersburg in 1831 and Osip Kovalevskiĭ, whose Mongol-Russian-French dictionary appeared in Kazan in 1844–1849.

Modern Mongolian grew out of Middle Mongol. In the change, vowel harmony shifted from a pattern of front and back vowels to one based on the tongue root, long vowels developed, the case system changed slightly and the verb system was restructured. Two vowels that were once front vowels are still often written ö and ü in the West, a trace of that history.

Where Mongolian ends and its neighbours begin is much disputed. No one doubts that the Khalkha of Mongolia is Mongolian, but Oirat (with Kalmyk), Buryat and Ordos may be dialects of it or separate languages. Sanžeev in 1953 counted only Khalkha, Chakhar and Ordos as Mongolian; Luvsanvandan in 1959 proposed a much broader language of central, eastern, western and northern dialects. One test often cited is the split of an old ch sound into ch and ts, found in Mongolia but not in Inner Mongolia, so that “few” begins with ts in Khalkha but with ch in Chakhar.

There are now two standards. In Mongolia the standard rests on the northern Khalkha dialects, including that of Ulaanbaatar, and is written in Cyrillic, which spread with Russian and Soviet influence; in Inner Mongolia it rests on the Chakhar of the Plain Blue Banner, which has only about 100,000 native speakers, and is written in the traditional script. Mongolia takes more loanwords from Russian, Inner Mongolia from Chinese. A Latin alphabet was tried in Mongolia in 1930–1932 and again in 1941, and in March 2020 the government announced plans to use both Cyrillic and the traditional script in official documents by 2025.

Mongolian has drawn words from many languages: first from Old Turkic, Sanskrit (often through Uyghur), Persian, Tibetan, Tungusic and Chinese, later from Russian, English and Mandarin. Sanskrit gave words of religion and learning, such as shashin, “religion”, and names of planets, among them sugar, Venus, from shukra; Persian gave bolor, “crystal”, and devter, “notebook”; Chinese gave everyday words such as cai, “tea”, buuz, “dumplings”, and van, “king”. In the 20th century Russian brought doktor and mashin, “car”, and more recently English brought komputer and onlain. Language commissions coin new terms, such as yörönkhiilögch, “president”, and shar airag, “beer”, literally “yellow kumys”.

The borrowing ran both ways. Persian took kešikci, “royal guard”, from kheshig and dâruqe from darga, “chief”; Chinese took hutong from gudum, “passageway”; Korean took sura, “royal meal”, from shüle; and Old English cocer and Old French quivre are thought to come from khökhüür, “container”, brought to Europe by the Huns or the Pannonian Avars. English and many other languages took the word khan.

For all its loans, Mongolian keeps its own core: Khalkha and Khorchin retain as many as 95% of 452 words of common Mongolic vocabulary. In Mongolia it is written in both Cyrillic and the traditional script, in Inner Mongolia in the traditional script, and Mongols in both countries often use the Latin script online.