Taking a long and indirect flight away from Wales, we now head to Mongolia and cover Mongolian, a language with a great deal to offer. The Mongolic languages have travelled far across the steppe, shaping and being shaped by their neighbours across Eurasia, and developing into a sprawling mix of dialects and languages.

The basics

Mongolian is the most widely spoken of the Mongolic languages, a family with a far-reaching history. What we would now call Mongolian has its first written texts around the 1220s, with the oldest surviving example being the Stele of Genghis Khan. This is also the first time we see written Mongolian script (more on that later), with many examples showing up later.

The Mongolic languages form a web of disparate but connected languages and dialects stretching from the North Caucasus to East China, centralised around modern Mongolia, where the Mongolian language itself is spoken. Mongolian can also be found in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, China, as well as in parts of Russia near the Mongolian border.

Why is this language interesting?

Mongolian is a language that has truly shaped the world and been shaped by it. As the Mongols were (and many still are) a nomadic people, their language has absorbed vocabulary from every corner of Eurasia – Arabic, Persian, Turkic languages, Chinese, Tibetan, and even Korean. Through centuries of communication and trade, war and conquest, the Mongolian language has been influenced by a whole array of sources.

At a time, shared language features across the steppe led some linguists to theorise that the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic families, and perhaps even Korean and Japanese, were all related in one large family, dubbed “Altaic“. Most modern linguists now believe that it was due to cross-contact, not by familial relation, that shared features moved between the languages. Many of these languages share extremely distinctive features, from vowel harmony to agglutination to even the basic grammar of building sentences – first the subject, then the object, then the verb (as learners of Japanese or Turkish will be familiar).

Writing on the wind

The Mongolian language has been written in nearly every script imaginable – its own native vertical alphabet was developed in the 1200s as an adaptation of the Old Uyghur alphabet and was the most widely used script for the language until Stalin’s cyrillisation program replaced it with a variation on the Cyrillic script in the 1940s, which remains dominant in the country of Mongolia today. However, the Mongolian alphabet still holds official status in Mongolia; the government actively attempts to increase its usage day-to-day. It is also still the primary writing system in Inner Mongolia.

Mongolian has also had brief flirts with many other writing systems, including the Khitan large script, Chinese, and Arabic. Latin was briefly adopted as an official script for two months in 1941 before being displaced by Cyrillic, although the Latin alphabet has seen an resurgence since the dawn of the Internet age as many Mongolian speakers in both Mongolia and China use it for convenience when communicating in forums not designed for vertical writing.

An ancient language, a modern culture

Mongolian carries a weighty history, but it is also the language of a thriving modern community. From horseback raves to throat-singing hip-hop, the Mongolian people have come bounding into the twenty-first century with style. The capital of Ulaanbaatar is one of the largest and most dynamic cities in Northern Asia, sporting over 1.7 million residents – over half the country’s population. It also holds the unenviable title of “coldest capital city on Earth”.

The Mongolian language has been a powerful way for communities in Mongolia and China to express their unique cultural identity and assert modernity. Artists like FOUX deliver a contemporary take on drawing-room chanson, performing Western ideals of refinement and class as a deliberate act while asserting their language and culture as belonging in that world.

Other artists take a different approach to incorporating foreign influence; The HU, for example, bends Western rock and metal tropes with Mongolian instruments and throat-singing techniques to deliver a unique “Mongolian modernism”, inserting their culture into the ongoing global musical dialogue.

What’s next for Mongolian?

Mongolian will likely see many more seismic changes to come over the next few decades as increasing Internet access reshapes how people communicate. Young speakers now freely flow between Mongolian, English, Chinese, and sometimes Russian, and the language is continuing to absorb non-native vocabulary at a rapid pace.

The language’s future in China is not yet settled, with growing Sinicisation efforts by the Chinese government suppressing the language’s use in schooling, media, and cultural expression – acts seen as setting the Mongolian people apart from the Han majority – but the language remains a strong cultural symbol of communities desperate to protect it.

From the courts of the Empire to kids sending memes on WhatsApp, the Mongolian language has seen it all, and has always found ways to persist. Its survival has always rested on adaptation, and it will be the next generation who decide how it sounds, looks, and lives in the centuries to come.