Mongolian language

Mongolian is the official language of Mongolia and the most commonly spoken and best-known member of the Mongolic language family. It is also the language of the Mongolian people. The total number of speakers across all dialects is estimated to be 5.2 million, which includes the great majority of Mongolians and a significant number of ethnic Mongols living in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China (also known as Inner Mongolia). Mongolia's Khalkha dialect is the most widely spoken, and it is now written in both Cyrillic and traditional Mongolian scripts, depending on the region (and at times in Latin for social networking). It is written in traditional Mongolian script and has a greater variety of dialects in Inner Mongolia than in the rest of the country.

The variety of Mongolian to be treated in the discussion of grammar that follows is Standard Khalkha Mongolian (i.e., the standard written language as formalised in writing conventions and grammar as taught in schools), but much of what is to be said is also valid for vernacular (spoken) Khalkha and for other Mongolian dialects, particularly Chakhar.

There is a tendency to identify a number of additional Mongolic languages as dialects of Mongolian, including Buryat and Oirat, however this categorization does not correspond to the current international standard.

The Mongolian language has a sophisticated syllabic structure, which is more complicated than that of other Mongolic languages. This syllablic structure enables clusters of up to three consonants to occur syllable-finally, which is uncommon in other Mongolic languages. Suffix chains are used extensively in both the verbal and nominal domains, making it a typical agglutinative language. In spite of the fact that there is a fundamental word order, subject–object–predicate, the ordering of noun phrases is largely open, since the various grammatical functions are expressed by a system of around eight grammatical cases. There are a total of five voices. Voice, aspect, tense, and epistemic modality/evidentiality are all indicated by the use of brackets around verbs. Converbs have a unique function in the construction of sentences by tying them together.

Middle Mongol, the language used during the Mongol Empire's reign in the 13th and 14th centuries, was the ancestor of modern Mongolian. During the transition, there was a significant shift in the vowel-harmony paradigm, the development of long vowels, a modest movement in the case system, and a reorganisation of the grammatical system. Mongolian is connected to the extinct Khitan language, which is written in a similar style. Previously, it was thought that Mongolian was connected to Turkic, Tungusic, Korean, and Japonic languages, but this view is now considered outdated by a majority of comparative linguists (though not all of them). All of these languages have been classified together as part of the Altaic language family, and they are contrasted with the linguistic region of Mainland Southeast Asia. Clauson, Doerfer, and Shcherbak, on the other hand, claimed that Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages constitute a linguistic Sprachbund, rather than that they have a similar genetic basis. [5] Mongolian literature has been documented in writing form since the 13th century, although it has Mongolic roots in the literature of the Khitan and other Xianbei peoples who lived thousands of years before the Mongols. The Bugut inscription, which dates back to 584 CE, and the Inscription of Hüis Tolgoi, which dates back to 604-620 CE, seem to be the two earliest significant Mongolic or Para-Mongolic inscriptions that have been unearthed.