Mongolian

Mongolian is the national language of Mongolia and an official language of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. It is also spoken in parts of the Russian Federation, Afghanistan, and North Korea. Mongolian is written in the Cyrillic script in Mongolia and the Latin script in Inner Mongolia. Mongolian belongs to the Mongolic language family, which also includes the extinct languages Khitan and Moghol. Mongolian is therefore sometimes referred to as the “Mongolian languages”. The number of speakers of Mongolian is difficult to estimate as there is no census data for languages in Mongolia. However, according to Ethnologue, there are about 6.2 million speakers of Mongolian, most of whom live in Mongolia. Mongolian has been written in a number of different scripts over the centuries. The earliest known script, used for the Mongolian translation of the Bible, was the Uyghur script, a Turkic script. This was replaced in the 13th century by the Mongolian script, which is still in use today. The Mongolian script is an alphabet, with each letter representing a single sound. Mongolian is a subject–object–verb language, meaning that the verb always comes last in a sentence. For example, the Mongolian translation of “I love you” would be “I you love”. Mongolian has no grammatical gender and no articles. Mongolian is a tonal language, with two contrasting tones: high and low. Tone can change the meaning of a word, for example, the Mongolian word for “dog” can be either high or low tone, and the two words have different meanings. Mongolian is a member of the Altaic language family, which also includes Turkish, Korean, and Japanese. The Altaic languages are thought to be related to each other through a common ancestor, which is sometimes referred to as “Proto-Altaic”. However, the exact nature of the relationship between the Altaic languages is still a matter of debate.