The Mongolian language

Introduction

As the name may suggest, Mongolian is primarily spoken by Mongolians in Mongolia and its surrounding areas. It is the best-known and largest member of the Mongolic language family, which is part of the Altaic family language. The Altaic family also includes Turkic and Manchu-Tungus languages. Turkic is the biggest in terms of its speakers as it includes Turkish and the Central Asian languages, while many of the Manchu-Tungus languages are endangered and their future is very uncertain. The Altaic family is a classification based primarily on typological criteria and not genetic. Therefore, the classification remains speculative and it is believed that its languages’ similarities arose as a result of areal diffusions and not shared inheritance.

It is difficult to track the origin of Mongolian, as it did not have a writing system till 13th century due to Mongolian nomadic culture. However historical documents in neighbouring countries show evidence that it was well established by the 5th century. Additionally as Mongolia is one of the oldest countries in the world, it is possible that the language they use is a very old language as well.

It is estimated to have 5 million speakers around the world. The most recognised dialect is Khalkha (or Halh), which is spoken in the capital city of Mongolia, Ulaanbaatar and most part of Mongolia. There are many other dialects spoken in different parts of Mongolia, especially in the West where many ethnic minorities live. However all the dialects spoken in Mongolia are intelligible, with only few words and phrases having different meanings in different dialects.

The status of certain varieties in the Mongolic group—whether they are languages distinct from Mongolian or just dialects of it—is disputed. There are at least three such varieties: Oirat (including the Kalmyk variety) and Buryat, both of which are spoken in Russia, Mongolia, and China; and Ordos, spoken around Inner Mongolia's Ordos City.[12]

In Inner Mongolia, official language policy divides the Mongolian language into three dialects: Southern Mongolian, Oirat, and Barghu-Buryat. Southern Mongolian is said to consist of Chakhar, Ordos, Baarin, Khorchin, Kharchin, and Alasha. The authorities have synthesized a literary standard for Mongolian in China whose grammar is said to be based on Southern Mongolian and whose pronunciation is based on the Chakhar dialect as spoken in the Plain Blue Banner.[25] Dialectologically, however, western Southern Mongolian dialects are closer to Khalkha than they are to eastern Southern Mongolian dialects: for example, Chakhar is closer to Khalkha than to Khorchin.

Besides Mongolian, or "Central Mongolic", other languages in the Mongolic grouping include Dagur, spoken in eastern Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang, and in the vicinity of Tacheng in Xinjiang; the Shirongolic subgroup Shira Yugur, Bonan, Dongxiang, Monguor, and Kangjia, spoken in China's Qinghai and Gansu regions; and the possibly extinct Moghol of Afghanistan.

Geographic distribution

Mongolian is the national language of the country of Mongolia, where it is spoken by about 2.7 million people, and an official language of China's Inner Mongolia region, where it is spoken by 2.7 million or more people.[5] The exact number of Mongolian speakers in China is hard to determine, as there is no data available on Chinese citizens' language proficiency. There are roughly five million ethnic Mongolians in China, but the use of Mongolian is in decline among them, especially among younger speakers in urban areas, due to the dominance of Mandarin Chinese.[6] The great majority of speakers of Mongolian proper in China live in Inner Mongolia; in addition, some speakers of the Kharchin and Khorchin dialects live in areas of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang that border Inner Mongolia.[7] According to Uradyn E. Bulag, anthropologist at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York, USA, Mongols are displaying significant linguistic anxiety about losing their language and linguistic identity to powerful Chinese nationalistic and cultural forces.

Grammar

The following description is based primarily on Khalkha Mongolian.

Mongolian has vowel harmony and a complex syllabic structure for a Mongolic language that allows clusters of up to three consonants syllable-finally. It is a typical agglutinative language that relies on suffix chains in the verbal and nominal domains. While there is a basic word order, subject–object–predicate, ordering among noun phrases is relatively free, so grammatical roles are indicated by a system of about eight grammatical cases. There are five voices. Verbs are marked for voice, aspect, tense, and epistemic modality/evidentiality. In sentence linking, a special role is played by converbs.

The standard language has seven monophthong vowel phonemes. They are divided into (or "aligned into", to use phonology jargon) three vowel harmony groups by a parameter called ATR (advanced tongue root); the groups are −ATR, +ATR, and neutral. This alignment seems to have superseded an alignment according to oral backness. However, some scholars still describe Mongolian as being characterized by a distinction between front vowels and back vowels, and the front vowel spellings 'ö' and 'ü' are still often used in the West to indicate two vowels which were historically front. The Mongolian vowel system also has rounding harmony.

Length is phonemic for vowels, and each of the seven phonemes occurs short or long. Phonetically, short /o/ is highly divergent from long /o/, being the central vowel [ɵ].

Vowel length. The pronunciation of long and short vowels depends on the syllable's position in the word. In word-initial syllables there is a phonemic contrast in length. A long vowel has about 208% the length of a short vowel. In word-medial and word-final syllables, formerly long vowels are now only 127% as long as short vowels in initial syllables, but they are still distinct from initial-syllable short vowels. Short vowels in noninitial syllables differ from short vowels in initial syllables by being only 71% as long and by being centralized in articulation. As they are nonphonemic, their position is determined according to phonotactic requirements.

The maximal syllable is CVVCCC, where the last C is a word-final suffix. A single short vowel rarely appears in syllable-final position. If a word was monosyllabic historically, *CV has become CVV.

Stress in Mongolian is nonphonemic (does not distinguish different meanings) and thus is considered to depend entirely on syllable structure. But scholarly opinions on stress placement diverge sharply. Most native linguists, regardless of which dialect they speak, claim that stress falls on the first syllable. Between 1941 and 1975, several Western scholars proposed that the leftmost heavy syllable gets the stress. Yet other positions were taken in works published between 1835 and 1915.

Modern Mongolian is an agglutinative, almost exclusively suffixing language, the only exception being reduplication.[46] Most of the suffixes consist of a single morpheme. There are many derivational morphemes.[47] For example, the word bajguullagynh consists of the root baj- 'to be', an epenthetic -g-, the causative -uul- (hence 'to found'), the derivative suffix -laga that forms nouns created by the action (like -ation in 'organisation') and the complex suffix –ynh denoting something that belongs to the modified word (-yn would be genitive).

Roughly speaking, Mongolian has eight cases: nominative (unmarked), genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, comitative and directional.[51] If a direct object is definite, it must take the accusative, while it must take the nominative if it is unspecific.[52] In addition to case, a number of postpositions exist that usually govern genitive, ablative, or comitative case or a form of the nominative that has sometimes -Vn either for lexical historical reasons or analogy (thus maybe becoming an attributive case suffix).

The noun phrase has the order: demonstrative pronoun/numeral, adjective, noun.[59] Attributive sentences precede the whole NP. Titles or occupations of people, low numerals indicating groups, and focus clitics are put behind the head noun.

The verbal phrase consists of the predicate in the center, preceded by its complements and by the adverbials modifying it and followed (mainly if the predicate is sentence-final) by modal particles.

In distant times Mongolian adopted loanwords from Old Turkic, Sanskrit (these often through Uighur), Persian, Arabic, Tibetan,[81] Tungusic, and Chinese.[82] Recent loanwords come from Russian, English,[83] and Chinese (mainly in Inner Mongolia).[84] Language commissions of the Mongolian state have been busy translating new terminology into Mongolian,[85] so that the Mongolian vocabulary now has jerönhijlögč 'president' ("generalizer") and šar ajrag 'beer' ("yellow kumys"). There are quite a few loan translations, e.g. galt tereg 'train' ('fire-having cart') from Chinese huǒchē (火车, fire cart) 'train'.

Writing

Mongolian has been written using a number of different writing systems. Until the 13th century, foreigners used their own writing systems to write the Mongolian language. At the beginning of Mongol Empire, in 1204, Genghis Khan (or Chingis Haan) ordered Uyghur (or Uigur) scribe Tatar-Tonga (or Tata-Tunga) to create a writing system for the Mongolian. It was based on Uyghur script and became the first official writing system of Mongolia and Mongol Empire at the time, now known as “Classic Mongolian Script”. It was used till 1941 in Mongolia, but it is still used in Inner Mongolia with only slight modification. Later Manchurians adopted the writing system for their language – Manchuria, which is a member of the Manchu-Tungus language family.

During these seven centuries, there were several other writing systems created in order to write and record Mongolian. First there was Phagspa script, created by the order of Kublai Khan (or Hubilai Haan) in the late 13th century to be used in the entire Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, consisting of over 30 million square kilometres. However it was not widely used and fell into disuse after the fall of the Empire. In the mid-17th century, an Oirat Buddhist monk created Clear Script, which is modified Classic Mongolian Script. This system was used by Kalmyks in Russia and is still used by Oirats in Xinjiang, China. In late-17th century, a Mongolian monk as well as Mongolian first Bogdo Khan (or Bogd Haan, the head of Mongolian religion), Zanabazar, created a new writing system called “Soyombo Script”, which can also be used to write Tibetan and Saskrit. A special character of the script, Soyombo, is now the national symbol of Mongolia and appears in the national flag, money, stamps, etc. Additionally there were two other known systems created. What is surprising is all these five systems were created by monks.

In 1941, the Cyrillic alphabet was adopted with slight modification (two letters added to the Russian Cyrillic alphabet) and now is the official writing system of Mongolia. This is a phonemic alphabet, meaning that there is a high level of consistency in the representation of individual sounds. This is well suited with the Mongolian language, as Mongolian does not have tones like Thai and every letter sounds in every word with the same pronunciation.

Texts.

The earliest surviving Mongolian text may be the Stele of Yisüngge, a report on sports composed in Mongolian script on stone, which is most often dated at 1224 or 1225.[93] The Mongolian-Armenian wordlist of 55 words compiled by Kirakos Gandzaketsi (13th century) is the first written record of Mongolian words.[94] From the 13th to the 15th centuries, Mongolian language texts were written in four scripts (not counting some vocabulary written in Western scripts): Uighur Mongolian (UM) script (an adaptation of the Uighur alphabet), Phagspa (Ph) (used in decrees), Chinese (SM) (The Secret History of the Mongols), and Arabic (AM) (used in dictionaries).[95] While they are the earliest texts available, these texts have come to be called "Middle Mongolian" in scholarly practice.[96] The documents in UM script show some distinct linguistic characteristics and are therefore often distinguished by terming their language "Preclassical Mongolian".

The next distinct period is Classical Mongolian, which is dated from the 17th to the 19th century. This is a written language with a high degree of standardization in orthography and syntax that sets it quite apart from the subsequent Modern Mongolian. The most notable documents in this language are the Mongolian Kanjur and Tanjur[98] as well as several chronicles.[99] In 1686, the Soyombo script (Buddhist texts) was created, giving distinctive evidence on early classical Mongolian phonological peculiarities.

Imperial Era (1204-1368)

This period starts with the adoption in 1204 of the Uyghur-based Mongolian script as the official script of Genghis Khan’s emerging Mongol Empire. The Mongol works that survive from this period reflect the prosperity and diversity of the global empire linked together by an efficient communications system. Yet they represent only a fraction of what would have existed then, since the majority of the works from this period has either not been found or has been destroyed amid the convulsions following the fall of the empire. Examples of lost works include the "Altan Debter", "Ikh Tovchoo" and "Great Yassa".

Significant works and writings in Mongol language from this period include: the Secret History of the Mongols (1240), Stele of Yesunkhei (1225), Text of Guyuk Khan’s Seal marked on a letter to the Pope (1241), Decree of Ogedei Khan (1240), Stele of Mongke Khan (1258), Parchment writings of the Golden Horde (1240s), Letter of Arghun to Philip the Fair (1289), Letter of Oljaitu to the King of France (1305), Letter of Arghun to Pope Nicholas IV (1290), Praise of Mahakala (1305), Commentary on the Bodhicaryavatara (1312), Banzragch sutra (early 14th century), Subashid sutra (1290s), Poem of Muhammad al-Samarqandi (1290s), Alexander Romance (13th-early 14th century), New Testament and Psalms translated by Giovanni da Montecorvino (1310s now lost), Altangerel sutra (1330s), Buddhist dedicatory inscription at Tsavchaal Boomt (1345), Book on sacrifice to the Big Dipper (1330s), Achlalt Nom or Xiao Jing (1307), Edicts of the Yuan Emperors from Kublai Khan to Toghontemur (1279-1368), Stone inscriptions at Karakorum (early 14th century), Writings unearthed at Turfan (early 14th century) and Square script inscriptions (1279-1368).

The legal writings of Mongolia in the form of edicts, decrees and laws are generally written in a special type of formulaic language. They might be termed legal literature.

Dark Ages (1368-1576)

Renaissance (1576-late 1700s)

After Dayan Khan (1464-1517?/1543?) restored political unity and reestablished the Genghisid line as supreme in Mongolia, the Third (and more thorough) Introduction of Buddhism beginning in 1576 led to further consolidation of unity among the formerly shamanic Mongol tribes. This, and the weakening of the Ming in the late 16th century, allowed the Mongols to enter a period of cultural Renaissance wherein numerous works of literature of many genres were created, including numerous fictional, historical, linguistic, legal and medical works. The Mongolian Renaissance continued under the Qing dynasty (1691-1911) and the rule of Bogd Khan (1911-1921). Despite the vast Communist persecutions of the 1930s with the destruction of most monasteries, a great many of these works have survived. The literary Mongolian language that developed during this period is today called Classical Mongol language, while that of the Imperial era and Dark Ages is called pre-Classical Mongol language.

The Kanjur and Tanjur, the translation of which started in the Imperial era, were completed in the Renaissance era. A complete Mongol collection called the "Golden Kanjur" (1628-1629) was published during the reign of Ligdan Khan in 113 volumes. Later, this version was edited and reprinted in 1718-1720. The Tanjur was finally completed in 1741-1749 and printed in 225 volumes. The oldest written version of the immense epic Geser, the Mongol version decreed by Kangxi, was printed in Beijing in 1716. The "Story of Endurel Khan" was published in 1666 and is a prominent work of fiction. Tsogt Taiji composed his popular poem in 1621 which was later written on a rock surface in 1624. This poem, which still exists, contains reflections about the basic unity in nature and human love.

Post-Renaissance (late 1700s-1921)

In the 19th century, there was a trend of critical thinking with Injanashi and Danzanravjaa satirizing the worldly pursuits of the Buddhist clergy as well as the excesses of the nobility. Prince Tokhtokhtor produced a book on practical advice concerning management of the traditional economy. Jimbadorji produced the "Bolor Toli", an encyclopaedia concerning detailed geographical information and observations about different countries, in 1833.

Revolutionary literature and "Socialist realism" (1921-1989)

Liberal literature (after 1989)