Mongolians in China

Genealogy/Relatedness  

The Mongolian language is a member of the Altaic language family and the Mongolian languages subfamily. It is spoken by around 7 million people in both Mongolia and China (including the regions of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia). It is most closely related to Oirat, Kalmyk, and Buryat (all part of the Mongolian language sub-family) [Binnick, 2011].  

Mandarin is a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family [Egerod, 2013]. Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese language, estimated to be spoken by 917 million people [Lane, 2019]. It is one of the oldest written languages in the world having been written for over 3,000 years [Lin, 2019]. 

Phonetics/Phonology 

Mongolian includes seven vowels, which are grouped into three vowel harmony categories using an ATR1 (advanced tongue root) parameter, where the groups are −ATR, +ATR, and neutral. The Mongolian vowel system also has rounding harmony.2 Length is phonemic for vowels, and each of the seven vowel phonemes can be short or long, making for 14 vowel contrasts. Mongolian includes 34 consonant phonemes, five of which are present only loanwords. Mongolian lacks the voiced lateral approximant [l] and the voiceless velar plosive [k], which are present in most world’s languages [Svantesson et al., 2005]. 

Mandarin includes five vowels and 22 consonants [Lin, 2007]. It is a tonal language with four tones: high level, rising, dipping (falling-then-rising), and falling, used to distinguish between morphemes that otherwise have the same string of vowels and consonants, but different meanings [The Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, 2014]. This is one of biggest differences between Mandarin and Mongolian. 

Morphology and Grammar 

Mongolian is an agglutinative language3. Nouns do not have gender or definiteness but can conjugate in eight cases: nominative (unmarked), genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, instrumental, comitative and directional [Janhunen, 2012]. Unmarked phrase order is subject-object-verb (SOV). While the verb generally has to remain in clause-final position, the other phrases are free to change order [Tserenpil & Kullmann, 2005]. 

Mandarin is an analytic language4 and does not use inflection. Categories such as number (singular or plural) when expressed and verb tense and aspect generally employ wordlike particles that are similar in their distribution to English prepositions. The basic word order is subject-verb-object (SVO). Like other East Asian languages, Mandarin uses classifiers with numerals and demonstratives with nouns. There are quite a few different classifiers, each used in combination with numeral and nouns of a particular class. For instance, counting two long thin objects (such as sticks or pens) would involve the classifier zhi and be 2-zhi, while two flat objects (such as book) would involve ben and be 2-ben  [Ross & Jing-Heng Sheng, 2006]. 

Lexicon and Vocabulary 

Mongolian borrowings include words from Old Turkic, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Tibetan, Tungusic, and Chinese. More recent loanwords are borrowed from Russian, English, and Mandarin Chinese, the last primarily in Inner Mongolia. In the 20th century Mongolian acquired numerous Russian loanwords pertaining to daily life (e.g., doktor (‘doctor’), vagon (‘train wagon’), and mashin (‘car’). More recently, due to socio-political changes, Mongolian has borrowed various words from English (e.g., menejment, computer, onlain (‘online’), and mesej (‘message’) [Janhunen, 2003]. 

The majority of Mandarin words are created out of native Chinese morphemes, including words describing foreign objects and ideas, but phonetic borrowings exist as well. Some words were borrowed from Sanskrit or Pāli, the languages of North India, while others came from Altaic languages of nomadic people of the Gobi, Mongolian or northeast regions [Kane, 2006]. In 20th century, Japanese became the source of borrowings related to modern technology [Chung, 2001]. 

Orthography/Writing System  

The traditional Mongolian script was adapted from Uyghur script (i.e., a script used between the 8th and 17th centuries primarily in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia, located in present-day Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China. Its features are similar to abjad and it is written vertically) approximately at the beginning of the 13th century. An attempt was made to introduce the Latin script in the Mongolian state (i.e., in the Soviet-influenced independent state of Mongolia) between 1930 and 1932, and although, the Latin alphabet was adopted in 1941, it lasted only several months. Russian influence at the time resulted in the development of the Mongolian Cyrillic script, which was made mandatory by government in 1941 [Svantesson et al., 2005].  

One of the main divides that exists between Inner Mongolia and Mongolia is written script. Mongolia uses the Cyrillic alphabet, while in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Mongolian is written in the Classical Mongolian script [Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region, 2019]. The Classical Mongolian script is written vertically from top to bottom, while the Cyrillic script is written horizontally from left to right [The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2012].   

In 2020, the Mongolian government announced plans to use both Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script in official documents by 2025 [China.org.cn, 2020]. 

Image: Vowels in Traditional Mongolian script, Cyrillic and Latin-based scripts (Retrieved 15 July 2021 from https://omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm) 

Image: Consonants in Traditional Mongolian script, Cyrillic and Latin-based scripts (Retrieved 15 July 2021 from https://omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm) 

Image: Consonant/vowel combinations in Traditional Mongolian script, Cyrillic and Latin-based scripts (Retrieved 15 July 2021 from https://omniglot.com/writing/mongolian.htm) 

Traditionally, Mandarin was written in a character script read in columns from top to bottom, with the columns ordered from right to left. In modern contemporary usage, texts are printed in rows, read from left to right, like English. Each Chinese character represents a monosyllabic Chinese word or morpheme, and these characters can be classified into six categories (i.e., pictographs, simple ideographs, compound ideographs, phonetic loans, phonetic compounds and derivative characters). Currently, there are two writing systems identified for Chinese characters. The traditional system, mainly used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau and Chinese speaking communities (except Singapore and Malaysia) outside mainland China, uses characters that are both more complex and more transparent in their meaning and pronunciation, since they are comprised of elements that have been stable for centuries (mostly keeping forms that date back to the late Han dynasty, 200 CE). The Simplified Chinese character system, introduced by the People’s Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy, simplifies most complex traditional characters to fewer strokes, and in so doing destroys much of the logic and transparency of the traditional system [Qiu, 2000] While the official rationale for simplification was to promote literacy, in practice simplification provided a way for the Chinese Communist Party to make pre-Communist Chinese texts difficult or impossible for people to read, thus severing the Chinese people’s ability to read and understand prerevolutionary texts. 

Discourse/Sociolinguistic Factors/Influences on Development/History 

Both Mongolian and Mandarin are the official languages of the Inner Mongolia, although in practice Chinese authorities often do not respect Mongolian’s official status and suppress its use when they can. The use of Mongolian language in China, specifically Inner Mongolia declined during the late Qing period (1636–1912), increased between 1947 and 1965, declined again between 1966 and 1976, increased again between 1977 and 1992, and declined for the third time between 1995 and 2012 [Tsung, 2014]. Despite the more recent declines in language use, the ethnic Mongols continue to try to preserve their language and identity [Janhunen, 2012].