Mongolian Languages

Know this topic well? Help others and get FREE products!

The Mongolian (or Mongolic) languages form a group of genetically related languages, spoken mostly in Mongolia, northern China, and some regions of Russia.

The family is generally subdivided into three groups—Central (or Eastern), Northern, and Western Mongolian. Some languages, especially those spoken in China, are commonly referred to as "isolated" within the family, though their taxonomic subdivision continues to be debated.

The most important language of the Central or Eastern Mongolian group is the official language of the Republic of Mongolia, generally called Mongolian (also known as Khalkha, after the prestige dialect; other important dialects in Outer Mongolia are Dariganga and Ujumuchin). It is spoken by 2.5 million people and written in Cyrillic script, although attempts to revert to the traditional Uighur script continue in Outer Mongolia. In the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, the language has always been written in the Uighur script, and the linguistic norm is largely based on the Chakhar dialect. Other important dialects of Inner Mongolia include Kharchin, Khorchin, Urat, and the somewhat divergent Ordos dialect, which is sometimes treated as a separate East Mongolian language.

In 1648, the Buddhist cleric Jaya Pandita developed the todo üseg ("clear script"), a modification of the Uighur script designed to write Oirat, or Western Mongolian. Oirat dialects are still spoken in western Mongolia and Xinjiang. In Russia, the Kalmyk language has around 130,000 speakers in the Kalmyk Republic on the lower Volga. The Northern Mongolian group is formed by Buryat and its dialects and is spoken in the Buryat Republic in Southern Siberia, where it has around 300,000 speakers and a Cyrillic-based written language.

Dagur (about 40,000 speakers) is spoken in the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, and an enclave in Xinjiang, where Dagurs were relocated in the eighteenth century. Another language of the Chinese northeast is Khamnigan, spoken in the Hulun Buir region of Inner Mongolia. Dagur and Khamnigan are probably the two most archaic modern languages of the family. A number of Mongolian languages are spoken in the Qinghai-Gansu border region. The language of the Tu nationality, formerly referred to as Monguor, is now separated into its two major variants, Huzhu Mongghul and Minhe Mangghuer. The Tu nationality numbers approximately 150,000 people. Baoan (Bonan) has around 10,000 speakers in Gansu, and Dongxiang, more properly Santa, also in Gansu, has 240,000 speakers. Along with Turkic and Tibetan-speaking groups, the linguistically complex group of the Yugur, also known as Sir-a (or yellow) Yugur, includes around 1,500 speakers of a Mongolian language, Jegün (Eastern) Yugur. In some remote pockets of northwestern Afghanistan, the Moghol language survived well into the twentieth century, but nothing is known about its fate after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

For Huzhu Mongghul, Dongxiang, and Dagur, Latin-script-based orthographies have been developed and introduced into national schools. Written Mongolian, the language of most Mongolian documents before the twentieth century, is generally viewed as close, but certainly not identical, to the common ancestor of all these languages, Proto-Mongolian. The first Written Mongolian documents date from the thirteenth century. Though the very first undoubtedly Mongolian text is a short inscription in Uighur script dating from 1227, the better part of early Mongolian writing has come down to us in different scripts. The longest of these early documents is Monggol-un ni'uca tobciyan (Secret History of the Mongols). A dynastic history of the descendants of Genghis Khan with elements reminiscent of epic poetry, it is only preserved in Chinese characters, designed to be read according to their phonetic values. Another important Sino-Mongolian document is the Mongolian part of the Hua-i I-yu, a Sino-Xenic glossary compiled in 1389.

In 1269, the Yuan emperor Khubilai Khan ordered the Buddhist cleric hPhags-Pa (1235–1280) to design a universal script for all languages of the empire. This so-called quadratic script (dörbeljin üseg), based on the Tibetan script, was short-lived, but some Mongolian documents written in it survive. A few Mongolian documents have been written in Arabic script, and some Mongolian words are preserved in Armenian and Georgian medieval documents. Because the language of the Sino-Mongolian and quadratic-script documents shows some peculiarities, which are already to be taken as secondary developments when confronted with more conservative Uighur-script Mongolian, the earliest written documents are often, somewhat paradoxically, said to be written in Middle Mongolian.

From the fourteenth century onward, the written medium for Mongolian is almost exclusively the vertical script, which was originally adopted from the Turkic-speaking Uighurs. After the seventeenth-century conversion of the Mongols to Tibetan Buddhism, a vast amount of canonical Buddhist literature was translated from Tibetan into Mongolian; the language of these translations is generally referred to as Classical Mongolian.

The Khitan confederation, masters of the Liao dynasty in northern China (907–1125), probably spoke an early variant of Mongolian. The highly complex script they used has not been fully deciphered, but based on Khitan glosses in Chinese texts, the Mongolian character of their language seems reasonably clear.

Modern Mongolian languages show all the typological traits that are generally taken as typical for the so-called Altaic languages: vowel harmony; verb-final word order; postpositions; exclusively suffixing, agglutinative morphology; and subordination by nominalization. On the whole, the family is typologically quite homogeneous. Among the more visible differences between them are the different ways the languages treat the problem of verbal concord. While the Central Mongolian languages do not show any verbal concord, the peripheral Northern and Western Mongolian languages (e.g. Kalmyk and Buryat), have developed a system of differentiating subject person by developing verbal suffixes from subject pronouns. Mongghul, Mangghuer, and Baoan have copied an intricate system of concord from Tibetan, which, together with numerous other features of their sound-structure, makes these southernmost Mongolian languages the least typical representatives of the family.

Stefan Georg

Beffa, Marie-Lise, and Roberte Hamayon. (1975) Eléments de grammaire mongole. Paris: Dunod.

Janhunen, Juha, ed. (forthcoming) The Mongolic Languages. Richmond, U.K.: Curzon.

Poppe, Nicholas. (1954) Grammar of Written Mongolian. Wiesbaden, Germany: Harrassowitz.

——. (1955) Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies. Helsinki, Finland: Finno-Ugrian Society.

——. (1970) Mongolian Language Handbook. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.

This complete Mongolian Languages contains 1,000 words. This article contains 1,144 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page).