LANGUAGE OF THE MONGOLS

A CYRILLIC VERTICAL SCRIPT

The first thing that may strike you about Mongolian writing is that it closely resembles Russian – this is because both languages are written in Cyrillic script. However, while it shares an almostidentical alphabet with Russian, Mongolian has a grammar structure more similar to that of Japanese and ultimately belongs to a language family of its own.

Why then, does Mongolia have such a writing system? If we look at the use of Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, a traditional vertical script is the national standard instead. The history of written Mongolian turns out to be a rather tumultuous one, with its origins deep in the 13th century.

While spoken Mongolian has been established since at least the 12th century, its written form only came into existence in 1204 when a scribe named Tatar-tonga introduced a Uyghur writing system to the Mongols. It was initially written horizontally, but soon morphed into a vertical script. Some historians attribute this to Chinese influence, while others say that the Mongols found a vertical script easier to scribe on a horse’s neck. This writing system remains in use within Inner Mongolia today, and is one of the only four vertical language scripts written from left to right.

There was an endeavour during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) to promote a new Phagspa script that could unite the spoken languages of Chinese, Tibetan and Mongolian, but this was short- lived because as a royal script, Phagspa was disconnected from the language of the common people. It was only 600 years later in the turmoil of Mongolia’s 1921 revolution that its written language faced a fundamental shift.

At that time, less than a tenth of Mongols could read and write. The country’s leaders believed that a Latin script could help to increase Mongolia’s literacy rate, and this gradually supplanted the traditional script’s place. In February 1941, Mongolia changed tack to advocate a Cyrillic script instead. This decision is believed to have been made under Soviet influence (Inner Mongolia considered adopting Cyrillic as well, but poor Sino-soviet relations suppressed this notion).

With the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the Mongolian government initiated a return to the Mongolian script. Limited resources made this attempt difficult to sustain, and Mongol children could only learn the traditional script in their first two grades. Today, the traditional script’s use within Mongolia is limited; but to its credit, the Cyrillic script was much more successful than its predecessors at increasing the country’s literacy rate.

sources: www.omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm, www.mongolia.peacecorps.gov/mongolian-language