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Mongolian language facts for kids

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Mongolian
монгол хэл ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠬᠡᠯᠡ
Native to Mongolia
Region All of state Mongolia and Inner Mongolia, parts of Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Xinjiang and Gansu provinces in China
Native speakers 5.2 million  (2005)
Language family
Mongolic
  • Mongolian
Early forms:
Middle Mongolian
  • Classical Mongolian
    • Mongolian
Standard forms
Khalkha (Mongolia)
Chakhar (China)
Dialects
Khalkha
Chakhar
Khorchin
Baarin
Shilin gol[not dialect link]
Ordos Mongolian
Darkhad
Writing system Mongolian alphabets:
Traditional Mongolian script
(in China),
Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (in Mongolia),
Mongolian Braille
Official status
Official language in Mongolia
China
Inner Mongolia
Regulated by Mongolia:
State Language Council,
China:
Council for Language and Literature Work
Linguasphere part of 44-BAA-b
Topographic map showing Asia as centered on modern-day Mongolia and Kazakhstan. An orange line shows the extent of the Mongol Empire. Some places are filled in red. This includes all of Mongolia, most of Inner Mongolia and Kalmykia, three enclaves in Xinjiang, multiple tiny enclaves round Lake Baikal, part of Manchuria, Gansu, Qinghai, and one place that is west of Nanjing and in the south-south-west of Zhengzhou
Geographic distribution of Mongolic peoples across Asia (red)
This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

The Mongolian language ( Monggol kele.svg, Mongɣol kele, Cyrillic: Монгол хэл, Mongol khel) is the best-known member of the Mongolic language family and the language of most of the residents of Mongolia, where it is officially written with the Cyrillic alphabet and of around three million Mongolian speakers in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China, where it is officially written with the traditional Mongolian script. It is also spoken in some areas in the Russian Far East and Kyrgyzstan. The majority of speakers in Mongolia speak the Khalkha (or Halh) dialect, while those in China speak one of many Inner Mongolian dialects.

  • Janhunen, Juha (ed.) (2003): The Mongolic languages. London: Routledge.

Images for kids

  • Ulan Bator 14

    Mongolian script and Mongolian Cyrillic on Sukhbaatar's statue in Ulaanbaatar

  • Nova N 176 folio 9

    Nova N 176 found in Kyrgyzstan. The manuscript (dating to the 12th century Western Liao) is written in the Mongolic Khitan language using cursive Khitan large script. It has 127 leaves and 15,000 characters.

  • White page with black Phags-pa characters and two seals, one being in the middle of and one on the right sight of the text. All lines start at the top of the page

    Edict of Yesün Temür Khan, Emperor Taiding of Yuan (1328). Only the 'Phags-pa script retains the complete Middle Mongol vowel system.

  • white page with several lines of black Chinese characters running top-down and separated into small groups by spaces. To the left of some of the characters there are small characters such as 舌　and 中. To the right of each line, groups of characters are indicated as such by a "]]"-shaped bracket, and to the right of each such bracket, there are other medium-sized characters

    The Secret History of the Mongols which goes back to a lost Mongolian script original is the only document that allows the reconstruction of agreement in social gender in Middle Mongol.

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