Mongolian Branch of the Altaic Language Family

Introduction

Mongolian is the best-known and largest member of the Mongolic language group. It is the primary language in the Mongolian People's Republic. It is also spoken in neighboring areas of China and Russia. Related languages include the following:

Daur	85,000	China
Mongour	90,000	China
Dongxiang	382,000	China
Buriat (Mongolia, China, Russia)	450,000	Mongolia, China, Russia
Darkhat	4,500	Mongolia
Kalmyk-Oirat	518,000	Russia


Mongolian People's Republic (Outer Mongolia)	Inner Mongolia

Mongolian Halh is spoken by over 2.3 million people in the Mongolian People's Republic where it has the status of a national language.
Peripheral Mongolian is spoken by by 3.4 million people, of whom 2.5 million are monolingual, in Inner Mongolia, and several adjoining provinces in northwest China. It is also spoken in Mongolian People's Republic . It has the status of an official regional language

Dialects

Mongolian has two major dialects:

Mongolian Halh
Mongolian Peripheral which includes Chahar, Oyirad, and Barghu-Buryat varieties

Although there are some phonological and lexical differences between the two dialects, they are mutually intelligible.

Structure

Sound System

Men on Horses

Mongolian Child

Mongolian Boy

Mongo lBoy

Mongolian Woman

Below is a description of the sound system of Mongolian Halh.

Vowels

there are 6 vowels : /i/, /e/, /a/, //, /o/, //, /u/. They can be either long or short. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. Long vowels can only appear in initial syllables.
there are four diphthongs: /ui/, /i/, /i/, and /ai/.
Mongolian has front-back vowel harmony. There are two kinds of vowels -- front vowels, which are produced at the front of the mouth, e.g., /i/, /e/, and back vowels, produced at the back of the mouth, e.g., /a/, /u/, /o/. Mongolian words can contain only all front or all back vowels, and all suffixes and affixes must conform to the vowel of the syllable preceding them in the word.
Some non-initial syllables do not have a vowel. In such cases, an epenthetic vowel is inserted between the consonants. Its form is predictable from the preceding vowel.

Consonants
Mongolian has a complex consonant system with 29 consonant phonemes, i.e., sounds that make a difference in word meaning. The consonant system has the these distinguishing characteristics:

Some consonants may be distinguished by the presence or absence of palatalization and aspiration. In the table below (Wikipedia), palatalization is marked by a raised j after the consonant.
There is no contrast between voiced and voiceless consonants.
There is a contrast between voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated consonants. In the table below , aspiration is marked by a raised h after the consonant
Mongolian lacks a phoneme /l/; instead, it has a voiced lateral fricative /lž/.
The consonants /p/, /p/, /k/, /k/, and /f/ occur only in borrowed words.
Consonant clusters do not occur at the beginning or end of words.

x		Labial		Dental		Post-alveolar	Velar		Uvular
xx		Palatalized	Plain	Palatalized	Plain	Post-alveolar	Palatalized	Plain	Uvular
Stops	voiceless aspirated	(p)	(p)	t	t	x	x	x	x
	voiceless	p	p	t	t	x	x	x	x
	voiced	x	x	x	x	x	g	g	G
Affricate	voiceless aspirated	x	x	x	ts	t	x	x	x
	voiceless	x	x	x	ts	t	x	x	x
Fricatives		(f)	x	x	s		x	x	x
Lateral fricative		x	x	l	l	x	x	x	x
Nasals		m	m	n	n	x	x		x
Approximants		w	w	r	r	j	x	x	xx

	sh in shop
t	ch in chop
ts	ts in cats
x	no equivalent in English
	ng in song

Mongolian Music

Mongol Wrestler

Khöömii (Throat) Singing
Exercised by a number of Central Asian tribes, especially in Tuva and Mongolia, Khöömii, or throat singing, is a peculiar vocal art.

Click on these links to learn more about it and to listen to samples of this music of the steppes.
Huun-Huur-Tu - Throat Singers of Tuva
Friends of Tuva

Three manly arts in Mongolia
Wrestiling (böke), horsemanship, archery.

Grammar

Mongol Man

Mongolian Parade

Mongol Man

Mongolian Woman

Mongolian is an agglutinative language. An agglutinative language is one in which each affix typically represents one unit of meaning, e.g.,'past tense', 'singular', etc. In an agglutinative language, affixes do not become fused with each other, but are simply added on one after the other. A distinguishing characteristic of Mongolian is that it uses postpositions instead of prepositions.

Nouns

Mongolian nouns are not marked for gender.
Number is optional.
There are eight cases marked by suffixes: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, ablative, instrumental, and comitative.
Nouns can take suffixes indicating that the marked noun is possessed by the subject of the sentence.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns exist for the 1st and 2nd person.
Proximal and distal demonstrative pronouns are used to indicate 3rd person.

Verbs
Mongolian has an elaborate verb system characterized by the following:

Verbs are not marked for person or number.
There are five moods: indicative, dubitative, imperative, conditional, subjunctive, optative,
There are three present and three past tenses in the indicative mood
The imperative can take different forms such as instructions, polite requests, etc.
Mongolian has passive and causative voice. In a passive sentence the agent (performer of the action) takes either dative or instrumental case. In the causative, the person caused to do something takes the instrumental or accusative case.
evidentiality is required at all times. It indicates whether evidence exists for a given statement. Mongolian contrasts direct information (reported directly) and indirect information (reported indirectly).
There are fairly complex rules for interrogative and negative forms

Word order
The normal word order in Mongolian sentences is Subject - Object - Verb, although some permutations are possible where context demands.

Vocabulary

Mongol Priests

Mongolian has borrowed words from many languages, including Sanskrit (via Uyghur), Tibetan, Chinese, Russian and English. In addition, government language commissions have been creating new words based on native elements to fill gaps in vocabulary and/or to replace borrowings from other languages, e.g., the Russian loanword pivo 'beer' now has a native Mongolian equivalent shar ayrag 'yellow kumys.' Loan translations are also common, e.g., the Chinese term renkou 'population' (literally, 'person' + 'mouth') is rendered into Mongolian as hun am (hun 'person' + am 'mouth').

Here are a few common Mongolian words and phrases.

Sain baina uu	Hello
Bayartai	Good bye
Bayarlalaa	Thank you
Uuchlaarai	I'm sorry
Tiim	Yes
Ugui	No
Khin	Man
Emergtei khin	Woman

Below are the numbers 1-10 in Mongolian.

1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
nig	xoyor	gurab	döröb	tab	dzorghaa	doloo	naym	yös	arab

Writing

Mongolian Art

Mongolian Script

Over the last 800 years, Mongolian has been written with a variety of different scripts, but the first of those and the most enduring is the one which the Mongols borrowed from the Uyghurs who had themselves adopted this script from the Sogdians, an ancient people of Iran, who had, in turn, borrowed their script from Syriac. Mongolian script was an alphabetic system written vertically from top to bottom and from left to right. All Mongolian words are written around a single straight line, called the spine. Individual letters are then represented by strokes and dashes away from the spine.

Click here for an illustrated description of the Mongolian script.

In 1943, the Mongol script was replaced by a slightly modified Cyrillic alphabet (two additional letters), still the most commonly used script in the Republic of Mongolia today. It has a high level of consistency in the representation of individual sounds. It is used in everyday life and on the Internet.

In Inner Mongolia, the traditional Mongol script is being replaced by a writing system based on the Roman alphabet, under pressure from the Chinese government.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Mongolian Cyrillic- and in Latin-based orthographies.

UDHR Mongolian

Mongolian words in English
English has borrowed a few words from Mongolian. Among them are the following:

Mogul	from Persian Mughul, from Mongolian mongγol 'Mongol.'
Kumys	an alcoholic beverage made from a mare's or camel's milk.

Resources

Click here to find out where Mongolian is taught in the United States.
Click here to find materials for studying Mongolian.

Online resources for the study of Mongolian
Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center
Yamada Language Center Guide for Mongolian
English-Mongolian Online Dictionary
Omniglot guide to Mongolian script
Lingua Mongolia
Mongolian language resources
Ethnologue report for Mongolian
Wikipedia article on Mongolian language