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Mongolian language

language culture Maturity 7-9 Next article →

Mongolian is a major language from the Mongolic family. It started on the Mongolian Plateau long ago. Today, about 5 to 6 million people speak it. They live in Mongolia and parts of East, Central, and North Asia. It is an official language in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia. It is also recognized in Xinjiang and Qinghai.

MongolicLanguagesGraph
MongolicLanguagesGraph

People use this language to share their culture and identity. It connects many different ethnic groups across a huge area.

Learning how the language works is very interesting. It uses a rule called vowel harmony. This means certain vowel sounds work together in words. It is also an agglutinative language. This means people add long chains of suffixes to words. These suffixes are added to the ends of nouns and verbs.

Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram
Mongolian vowel harmony Venn diagram

The language has a special word order: subject, then object, then verb. There are also eight grammatical cases to show a word's role. Verbs can show tense, aspect, and even how much the speaker knows.

History shows us how the language has changed over time. Modern Mongolian grew from Middle Mongol. That was the language used during the Mongol Empire in the 13th and 14th centuries. During that time, people used four different scripts. They used the Uyghur script and the 'Phags-pa script for official decrees.

Kublai Khan's order
Kublai Khan's order

They also used Chinese and Arabic scripts for certain tasks. The earliest surviving text might be a report on sports from around 1224.

Nova N 176 folio 9
Nova N 176 folio 9

There are many different ways to write the language today. In Mongolia, Khalkha Mongolian is the most common variety. People there use both the Cyrillic script and the traditional Mongolian script.

Ulan Bator 14
Ulan Bator 14

In Inner Mongolia, the traditional script is used more often. Because of the internet, many people use the Latin script for convenience. The language has many branches. The Common Mongolic branch includes Khalkha, Khorchin, Ordos, Oirat, Khamnigan, and Buryat. Some people even debate if Buryat and Oirat are separate languages or just dialects.

Mongolian links the past to the modern world. Old texts like the Bugut inscription date back to 584 CE. Even though some groups have lost the language, they still identify as ethnic Mongols. This shows how much the language matters to their sense of self. In Inner Mongolia, the use of the language has gone up and down through history. Despite these changes, the language remains a vital part of life for millions of people.

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🖼️ 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
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