Сайн уу? (Sen oo) Hello, Mongolian language! What do you have in store for a curious langventurist who decides to face you? Uncertainty of origins, many different historical and geographic versions and dialects, several scripts functioning on their own, "acoustic" resemblance to many other languages, the intricate grammar... That is quite a demanding journey to take!
So instead of going deep into the details and nuances, let us try and simplify the situation a little to have the big picture of the language, a broad understanding of what it is all about. But first, have your own take, form your own opinion by listening to this very catchy song in Mongolian by the band "The Hu" that went viral (05:52) —the actual song starts after the minute 1:30— called "Yuve Yuve Yu" which translates as "How strange, how strange":
Hey, the lyrics of the song in English are here!
So that song is performed in the Mongolian language, or, to be more precise —since there are so many versions of it—, in the Khalkha dialect which de facto is the national language of Mongolia and is spoken by the majority of the speakers of the language. There are around 5,2 million speakers of all the dialects in total —mainly in Mongolia, parts of Russia, China and Kyrgyzstan.
Its western dialects are seen as the easier ones and the eastern —are harder. Although the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of different dialects differ, with enough exposure they are mutually easy to understand. But as to Mongolia, due to the lack of interest to any other dialect and said exposure, one Mongolian from, say, UlaanBaatar may find it difficult to form a dialogue with another Mongolian, say, from Hohhot (Inner Mongolia).
Besides geographically distinct dialects, there are also different versions of the language in time as the evolution of the language and the history of the country itself made their impact: Old Mongolian (through the 12th century), Middle Mongolian (13th–16th centuries), and surely Modern Mongolian (17th century to the present).
The point here to take away is that the Mongolian language has many different versions, but chances are that the one you would come across after having decided to learn Mongolian is that called Khalkha Mongolian —unless you are in China, in which case it will probably be the Shiilin Gol dialect.
Now back to the sounds of Mongolian. Check out the natural flow of the language with this short video about Khuumi —the traditional Mongolian art of throat singing (2:09):
To me, as a Russian, the rhythm of the Mongolian speech is very similar to that of Russian. And no wonder: almost all the sounds of the language exist in Russian except for two represented by the letters Ө и Ү. Yet, Mongolian has nothing to do with the Slavic languages! And I won't understand a word of it with just my Russian "knowledge base".
Ok, then probably it is Chinese-like, since the country was under the Chinese rule for about 300 years? And again, no. Knowing Khalkha Mongolian will not help you even in the slightest with studying Chinese. Sure, there exist words that are borrowed from the Chinese language (mostly food) but that's as far as it goes.
Turns out, it is actually the Turkic languages —like Turkish, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek and some others— that are the closest ones to Mongolian language due to similar structure and phonetics. Because Mongolian is an agglutinative language —in other words a language in which words are made up by joining morphemes together, part by part, like in a chain,— it's hard to deny the resemblance to the structure of the mentioned Turkic languages.
The truth is, the origins of Mongolian are still debated, but the broadly shared opinion is that it comes from the Altaic language family, that joins it with the Turkic ones under one wing.
If the "origin story" of Mongolian seems confusing, wait for its "script frenzy". For now, just remember that even though Mongolian is an East Asian language, it is not in any way related to Chinese, Japanese or even Korean —the most known representatives of that group. Here, make sure yourself by listening to songs in the mentioned 4 languages (7 minutes):
The Mongolian language is quite a special one. Yes, the origins are confusing; yes, the range of the dialects is vast, but the good news is Mongolian words sound exactly the way they are spelled, and the grammar rules in Mongolian rarely have exceptions (which is not something English can boast about!).
And we haven't even seen yet all the different ways you can write in Mongolian! That is the subject for the whole another Episode!
But first, something unexpected that not many people think about when talking about the Mongolian language: Genghis Khan! Oh sure, you know the man —the warrior-ruler, founder, first Great Khan and Emperor of the Mongol Empire, the largest land empire in history! Which language do you think did this great Mongolian khan speak? Answer: NOT the Khalkha Mongolian! (Whaaat?)
There, it is just getting interesting ;) See you in the next Episode!
Daraa uulzii! See you later!
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