Nepedia
Back to Discover
Independent Reader
📖

Mongolian language

language culture Maturity 7-9 Next article →

Mongolian is a way of speaking and writing.

Ulan Bator 14
Ulan Bator 14

It belongs to the Mongolic language family. This family began on the Mongolian Plateau. Today, about 5 to 6 million people speak it. They live in Mongolia and parts of Asia.

MongolicLanguagesGraph
MongolicLanguagesGraph

There are many ways to write Mongolian. In Mongolia, people use Khalkha Mongolian. They write it with Cyrillic letters or a traditional script. In Inner Mongolia, people mostly use the traditional script. Many people use the Latin script to talk on the internet.

Kublai Khan's order
Kublai Khan's order

This language has a long history. It grew from Middle Mongol. That was the language of the Mongol Empire. People wrote in Mongolian as far back as the 13th century. They used many different scripts back then. One was the Uyghur script. Another was the 'Phags-pa script, which was used for official orders.

Mongolian has special rules. It uses vowel harmony. This means certain sounds work together in words. It also uses many suffixes. A suffix is a group of letters added to the end of a word. This helps show how words work in a sentence.

Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram
Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram
180 words

Where will your curiosity go next?

Keep exploring at your chosen reading level.

🖼️ Images & Media (6)
File:Monggol kele.svg
Monggol kele.svg
File:Kublai Khan's order.jpg
Kublai Khan's order.jpg
File:MongolicLanguagesGraph.svg
MongolicLanguagesGraph.svg
File:Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram.svg
Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram.svg
File:Nova N 176 folio 9.jpg
Nova N 176 folio 9.jpg
File:Ulan Bator 14.JPG
Ulan Bator 14.JPG
More to explore

🔬 Go deeper

More advanced topics to explore

🪜 Step back

Simpler topics to build understanding

What is Nepedia?

A free, ad-free encyclopedia for children. Every article is written at five reading levels, so the same page works for a five-year-old and a fifteen-year-old — use the level switcher above to see this one change. No account needed to read.