Mongolian Languages

Mongolian languages, one of three families within the Altaic language group. The Mongolian languages are spoken in Mongolia and adjacent parts of east-central Asia. Their subclassification is controversial, and no one scheme has won universal approval. The central Mongolian languages are usually divided into a western group, consisting of the closely related Oirat (spoken in Mongolia and in the Xinjiang region of China) and Kalmyk (Russia), and an eastern group, consisting of the closely related Buryat (Russia) and Mongol (Mongolia and China) languages. Outlying languages—Moghol (spoken in Afghanistan), Daur (Inner Mongolia, China), Yellow Uyghur (East Yogur, not to be confused with the Turkic Yellow Uyghur [West Yugar]; Gansu province, China), and the southern group of Monguor (Tu), Dongxiang, and Bao’an (Bonan), which are spoken on the border between the provinces of Gansu and Qinghai—exhibit archaic features. All of the central, but none of the outlying, languages have written forms.

The history of the Mongolian language, both spoken and written, consists of three periods. The divisions of the spoken language are Old, or Ancient, Mongolian (through the 12th century), Middle Mongolian (13th–16th centuries), and New, or Modern, Mongolian (17th century to the present). Old Mongolian is reconstructed from borrowings in other languages and by comparison of the recorded Mongolian languages. The Mongolian vertical script language developed at the end of the 12th century; the oldest extant text dates from roughly 1225. The Pre-Classical period of the written language corresponds to Middle Mongolian. This language is slightly more archaic than the contemporary Middle Mongolian recorded in Chinese transcription in the Secret History of the Mongols (c. 1240) and in other texts and glosses in the Chinese, ’Phags-pa, Persian, and Latin scripts. The conversion of the Mongols to Buddhism (c. 1575) ushered in the Classical period (17th and early 18th centuries) of translation of scriptural texts from Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, and this period corresponds to the commencement of the Modern period of the spoken language. Not until the 19th century did features of contemporary spoken Mongolian languages begin to appear in Mongolian texts.

With the translation of Buddhistic texts, Mongolian received a large number of Sanskrit, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uyghur terms, including not only technical religious words but also personal names and astronomical and calendrical terms.

At the end of the Ancient Mongolian period, the Mongolian language began to spread from its original homeland, and, during the Middle Mongolian period, various dialects began to develop into separate languages. The outlying languages—which today survive as Moghol in Afghanistan; Daur in the east; and Monguor (Tu), Bao’an (Bonan), and Santa (Dongxiang) in the south—were isolated from the main body of Mongolian languages when the tide of Mongol conquest receded. These languages diverged from the main group of Mongolian dialects and to this day retain archaic features characteristic of Middle Mongolian that have been lost in other Mongolian languages; e.g., many retain /f/ and /h/ from Proto-Altaic */p/ (an asterisk identifies a sound as a hypothetical, reconstructed form), as well as unassimilated vowel sequences. An example of the latter phenomenon is Middle Mongolian e’ü (which in Classical Mongolian contained a medial velar, egü), where other languages have merged the vowels into a single, long vowel (thus ṻ).