Spoken in: Mongolia, China, People's Republic of, Kyrgyzstan, Russia.

Region: All of Mongolia, Buryatia in Russia, Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan, and Inner Mongolia, Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang provinces in China.

Total speakers: 5.7 million.

Language family: Altaic, Mongolic, Eastern, Oirat-Khalkha, Khalkha-Buryat, Mongolian.

Official status
Official language in: Mongolia, China, People's Republic of (Inner Mongolia).

The Mongolian language (ìîíãîë õýë, mongol khel) is the best-known member of the Mongolic language family and the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia, where it is officially written with the Cyrillic alphabet. It is also spoken in some of the surrounding areas in northern China, the Russian Far East and Kyrgyzstan. The majority of speakers in Mongolia speak the Khalkha (or Halh) dialect, while those in China speak the Chahar, Oyirad, and Barghu-Buryat dialect groups.


Classification

Mongolian is a Mongolic language. The Altaic theory proposes that the Mongolic family is a member of the larger Altaic family, which would also include the Turkic and Tungusic languages. Related languages include Kalmyk spoken near the Caspian Sea and Buryat of East Siberia, as well as a number of minor languages in China along with the Nikudari and Mogholi languages of Afghanistan.


Geographic distribution

Over two million people speak Mongolian throughout Mongolia. There are also up to three million speakers in Northern China, who, however, form only a shrinking minority of the overall population of Inner Mongolia, especially of its cities. Khalkha Mongolian is the national language of Mongolia. In Inner Mongolia, the standard Mongolian language is based on Chahar Mongolian.


Dialects

The more recognised dialect is Khalkha which is spoken in the capital of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar, and most of Mongolia. In China, the dialect of the Plain Blue Banner in central Inner Mongolia, which belongs to the Chahar dialect group, is the official pronunciation standard.


Grammar

The grammar is based primarily on urban Khalkha Mongolian, but much of the description of is also valid for Southern Central Mongolian, for example Chahar.


Lexicon

The Mongolian vocabulary includes historic loan words especially from Old Turkic, Sanskrit (often through Uigur), Tibetan, Chinese and Tungusic and keeps adopting more recent ones from Russian, Chinese and English. Commissions in the Mongolian state have been busy translating new terminology into Mongolian, so that Mongolian words such as 'president' <jerönhijlögč> ("generalizer") and 'beer' øàð àéðàã ("yellow kumys") exist (though this one is second to Russian <pivo>). There are quite a few loan translations, e.g. ‘population’ <hün am> (“person mouth”) from Chinese rénkŏu (人口; 'population').


Morphology

Modern Mongolian is an agglutinative, exclusively suffixing language; the suffixes are most often composed of a single morpheme. It has a rich number of morphemes to build up more complex words from simple roots. For example, the word <bajguullagynh> consists of the root <baj-> ‘to be’, an epenthetic <-g->, the causative <-uul-> (then ‘to found’), the derivative suffix <–laga> that forms nouns created by the action (‘organisation’) and the complex suffix <–ynh> denoting something that belongs to the modified word (<-yn> would be genitive).

Nominal compounds abound. Some derivational verbal suffixes are particularly productive, e.g. <jar’-> 'to speak', <jarilts-> 'to speak with each other'. Formally, verbal suffixes that create independent words can roughly be divided into three classes: final verbs, which can only be used sentence-finally, i.e. <-na> (mainly future or generic statements) or –ø (second person imperative); participles (often called “verbal nouns”), which can be used clause-finally or attributively, i.e. <-san> (probably perfective, otherwise past) or <-maar> (‘want to’); and converbs, which can link clauses or function adverbially, i.e. <-ž> (qualifies for any adverbial function or neutrally connects two sentences) or <-tal> (the action of the main clause takes place until the action expressed by the suffixed verb begins).

Roughly speaking, Mongolian has eight cases: nominative (unmarked), genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, comitative and directional. In addition, a number of postpositions exist that usually govern genitive, ablative or comitative case or an oblique form, that is, the stem plus sometimes -Vn either for historical reasons or analogy (thus maybe becoming an attributive case suffix). Nouns can take reflexive-possessive clitics indicating that the marked noun is possessed by the subject of the sentence: <Bi najz(-)aa alsan> I friend- kill- ‘I killed my friend’. There are also rather noun-like adjectives that will be converted into nouns when taking any case suffix, but cannot function nominatively without the multifunctional clitic <n’>. Plural does not need to be marked, but plural suffixes are becoming more and more common.

Personal pronouns exist for the first and second person, while the old demonstrative pronouns have come to form third person (proximal and distal) pronouns. Other word (sub-)classes include interrogative pronouns, conjunctions (which take participles), spatials and quite a few particles. (Word classes are treated with some simplification here. For a more precise treatment, see Sechenbaatar 2003.)

Negation is mostly expressed by <-güj> after participles and by the negation particle <biš> after nouns and adjectives; negation particles preceding the verb (for example in converbal constructions) exist, but tend to be replaced by analytical constructions.


Syntax

Phrase structure

The nominal phrase has the order: demonstrative pronoun/numeral, adjective, noun. Attributive sentences usually (…) precede the whole NP. Titles or occupations of people, low numerals indicating groups and focus clitics are put behind the head noun. Possessive pronouns (in different forms) may either precede or follow the NP. E.g. <bidnij uulzsan ter sajhan zaluugaas č> we-genitive meet-perfective that beautiful young_man-ablative focus ‘even from that beautiful young man that we have met’, <Dorž bagš maan’> Dorj teacher our ‘our teacher Dorj’.

The verbal phrase consists of the predicate’s complements and the adverbials modifying it in front of it and, mainly if the predicate is sentence-final, particles behind it. E.g. <Ter helehgüjgeer ünijg bičsen šüü> S/he without_saying it-accusative write-perfective particle ‘She wrote it without saying (so I can assure you).’ In this clause the adverbial should precede the complement as it is itself derived from a verb and could take ‘it’ as its complement. If the adverbial was an adjective à la <hurdan> 'fast', it could immediately precede the predicate. There are also instances in which the adverb must immediately precede the predicate.

The predicate itself may consist of a noun or an adjective with or without a copula, but if the subject isn’t marked by <bol> or <n'> as topic, a bare noun will look a little awkward. Verbs will never take a copula. Consider this example: <aldag> 'kills regularly' <aldag bajna> 'kills regularly (as I have come to know by some time of observance)': though <bajna> would be a mere copula if put behind a noun, in this case it indicates referentiality. However, any participle can be followed by an auxiliary carrying additional information. For example, if the verbal noun expressing regularity is chosen, the information “perfective” will have to be encoded in an auxiliary: <aldag bajsan> 'killed regularly' If the speaker wished to express how s/he acquired such knowledge, an additional <bajna> could be added. Simple progressive aspect is built up by a verb, the neutral converb <-ž> and the auxiliary <baj->. In place of <baj->, some other verbs could express other aspects like completion: <uuž orhison> drink-CV leave-perfective 'drank up'. However, a few aspects may be expressed adverbially: <ehelž uusan> begin-CV drink-perfective 'began to drink' (or <uuž ehelsen> with the same meaning).


Clauses

Unmarked phrase order is subject, object, predicate. While the predicate generally has to remain in clause-final position, the other phrases are free to change order or to wholly disappear. The topic tends to be placed clause-initially, new information rather before the predicate. Noun phrase heads modified by long attributive clauses will for the sake of understandability be placed clause-initially. Topic can form a phrase of its own (with <bol> or even <n’>), but this option isn’t extensively used.

Mongolian has passive and causative voice. In a passive sentence the entirely oblique agent takes either dative or instrumental case, the first of which is more common. The verb takes a suffix <-gd->. In the causative, the person caused to do something would take instrumental, or accusative, if the simple verb would have been intransitive, and the verb would take <-uul->. Causative morphology is also used in some passive contexts: <Bi tüünd chaduulsan> I s/he-dative fool-caustive-perfective ‘I was fooled by her/him’. Animacy is an important component, thus English 'The bread was eaten by me' would not be acceptable in Mongolian. <-ld-> (reciprocal), <-tsgaa-> (plurative) and <-lts-> (cooperative) are voice constructions as well.


Compound sentences

One way to conjoin clauses is to have the first clause end in a converb. An example: <Bi üünijg olbol čamd ögnö> I it-accusative find-conditional_converbal_suffix you-dative give-future ‘If I find it I’ll give it to you’. Some verbal nouns in the instrumental or most often dative function very similar to converbs: above sentence with <olohod> find-imperfective-dative ‘When I find it I’ll give it to you’. Quite often, postpositions govern complete clauses. In contrast, conjunctions take verbal nouns without case: <jadarsan učraas untlaa> become_tired-perfective because sleep-witnessed_perfective 'I slept because I was tired'. Finally, there are usually clause-initial particles with relating meaning: <Bi olson, harin čamd ögöhgüj> I find-perfective but you-dative give-imperfective-negation ‘I’ve found it, but I won’t give it to you’.

Mongolian has a complementizer auxiliary verb <ge-> very similar to Japanese to iu. <ge-> literary means ‘to say’ and in converbal form <gež> precedes a verbum sentiendi et dicendi. As a verbal noun <gedeg> (with <n’> or case) it can form a subset of complement clauses. As <gene> it may function as quotative.

Except for clauses governed by certain postpositions, attribute clauses, clauses with complementizer and some very short converbal clauses (which some speakers reject anyway), Mongolian clauses are in strictly paratactic order, such that a hypotactic sentence like 'We will, IF you help us, repair the damage.' could in this order with the same syntactic relations not be constructed in Mongolian.

In the subordinated clause the subject, if different from the subject of main clause, sometimes has to take accusative or genitive case. Subjects in either instrumental or ablative case marginally occur as well. Subjects of attribute clauses in which the head has a function (as is the case for all English relative clauses) demand that if the subject is not the head it has to take instrumental or rather genitive case, e.g. <tüünij idsen hool> that_one-genitive eat-perfective meal ‘the meal that s/he had eaten’.


Mongolian writing systems

Mongolian has been written in a variety of alphabets over the years.

The traditional Mongolian script was adapted from Uyghur script in 1208, although it has undergone transformations, and occasionally been supplemented by other scripts. The Mongolian alphabet was used in Mongolia until 1931, when it was temporarily replaced by the Latin alphabet, and finally by Cyrillic in 1937. The traditional alphabet was abolished completely by the pro-Soviet government in 1941, and a short-lived attempt to reintroduce the traditional alphabet after 1990 was abandoned after some years.

In the People's Republic of China, the Mongolian language is a co-official language with Mandarin Chinese in some regions, notably the entire Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The traditional alphabet has always been used there, although Cyrillic was considered briefly before the Sino-Soviet split. There are two types of written Mongolian used in China: the classical script, which is official among Mongols nationwide, and the Clear script, used predominantly among Oirats in Xinjiang.