Interesting facts about the language

Mongolian is spoken by almost six million people today. The language can be divided into two main dialects: the approximately 2.3 million speakers in Mongolia speak Khalkha Mongolian. In the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, which is part of the People's Republic of China, around 3.3 million people speak what is known as Southeastern Mongolian. However, their share of the population in Inner Mongolia only accounts for around 12 percent. Smaller Mongolian-speaking minorities can also be found in Russia, Taiwan, and Kyrgyzstan. Native speakers of Khalkha Mongolian and Southeastern Mongolian can generally converse easily.

The oldest written records of the Mongolian language date back to the 13th century AD. The traditional writing system of the Mongolian language is a modified version of the Uyghur script. Due to the immense power of the Mongol Empire at the time, the Mongolian script was the most widely used script in Asia during the Middle Ages. In the 1920s, Outer Mongolia came under increasing Soviet influence, which led to far-reaching reforms of the language. In 1931, the Latin script was introduced for Khalkha Mongolian, which in turn was replaced by the (slightly modified) Cyrillic alphabet from 1937 onwards. In 1941, the traditional script was officially abolished. In Inner Mongolia (People's Republic of China), however, the traditional script has always been used and is still used today. Since the late 1980s, however, the traditional Mongolian script has experienced a (small) renaissance in Outer Mongolia, and today you can once again find this traditional script on many businesses and company logos. However, the Cyrillic alphabet continues to be used in everyday writing, in newspapers, etc.

The Mongolian language belongs to the Altaic language family, whose individual languages are spoken in many countries of Southeastern Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, as well as in Southern Siberia and Northern China. The most important representatives of the Altaic languages include the Turkic languages (e.g., Bulgarian, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and Turkish) and the Mongolian language.