Mongolian Languages

Mongolian languages, group of languages forming a subdivision of the Altaic subfamily of the Ural-Altaic family of languages (see Uralic and Altaic languages). The Mongolian languages are spoken by about 6 million people, mainly in the Republic of Mongolia, in the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region of China, and in the region of Lake Baykal in Siberia. There are also some speakers of Mongolian tongues in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region and in Manchuria, both in China. The Mongolian languages fall into two principal divisions: Western Mongolian, to which Kalmyck belongs, and Eastern Mongolian, which includes Buryat, Khalkha, and others. Khalkha, or Mongol proper, is the most important Mongolian language. The official tongue of the Republic of Mongolia, it is native to more than 2 million people. Like the other Uralic and Altaic languages, the Mongolian tongues exhibit vowel harmony and are agglutinative. They lack grammatical gender and use postpositions instead of prepositions. For many centuries the Mongols had their own system of writing, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, a Semitic alphabet. After 1941 the traditional Mongol script yielded to a modified Cyrillic alphabet in the Republic of Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia, owing to the policy of the People's Republic of China, the traditional Mongol script is being replaced by a writing based on the Roman alphabet.

Bibliography

See N. N. Poppe, Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies (1955) and Mongolian Language Handbook (1970); J. E. Bosson, Modern Mongolian (1964).

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Mongolian languages

Family of about eight Altaic languages spoken by five to seven million people in central Eurasia. All Mongolian languages are relatively closely related; those languages whose speakers left the core area in Mongolia the earliest tend to be the most divergent. The most remote language is Mogholi (Moghul, Mongol), now spoken by fewer than 200 people in western Afghanistan. Less divergent are the languages of several ethnic groups in northwestern China, eastern Qinghai, and adjacent parts of Gansu and Inner Mongolia, altogether spoken by fewer than 500,000 people. The core languages are Mongolian proper, the dominant dialect in the Republic of Mongolia and the basis of Modern Standard Mongolian, and a group of peripheral dialects. The core group of Mongolian speakers traditionally have used Classical Mongolian as their literary language; it is written in a vertical alphabetic script borrowed from the Uighurs (see Turkic languages). Modern Mongolian was written in this script until 1946, when the People's Republic of Mongolia introduced a script using a modified Cyrillic alphabet. With political democratization in the 1990s, the old script has been revived. In Inner Mongolia it has been in continuous use.

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Mongolian Languages 

the languages of the Mongolian peoples, which developed out of the dialects of early Mongolian (spoken by all the Mongol tribes) between the 14th and 16th centuries after the disintegration of the empire founded by Genghis Khan. The Mongolian languages comprise the northern Mongolian, synharmonic languages, including Mongolian proper, Buriat, Kalmyk, and Oirat; the southeastern, nonsynharmonic languages, including Daghur in northeastern China and Tunghsiang, Monguor, and Paoan in Tsinghai and Kansu provinces (all these languages are unwritten); and the intermediate languages—the Old Mongolian literary language and the Mogul language in Afghanistan.

Prior to the formation of a national state, the Mongols did not have a well-developed literary language and writing system that could serve as a means of written communication and preserve their cultural unity. The disintegration of the Mongol state in the 16th and 17th centuries did not result in the disappearance of Mongolian proper because it had become a literary language, serving as a means of cultural and linguistic contact between the northern and southern (or Outer and Inner) Mongols. Mongolian proper, Buriat, and Kalmyk are the best known of the Mongolian languages.

REFERENCES

Vladimirtsov, B. la. Sravnitel’naia grammatika mongol’skogo pis’mennogo iazyka i khalkhaskogo narechiia: Vvedenie ifonetika. Leningrad, 1929.
Sanzheev, G. D. Sravnitel’naia grammatika mongol’skikh iazykov, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1953–64.
Todaeva, B. Kh. Mongol’skie iazyki i dialekty Kitaia. Moscow, 1960.
Poppe, N. Introduction to Mongolian Comparative Studies. Helsinki, 1955.
Altaistik, Zweiter Abschnitt, Mongolistik. Leiden-Cologne, 1964.

G. D. SANZHEEV