The Mongolian Cyrillic Alphabet: All 35 Letters

Thirty-five letters, not thirty-three

Mongolian has been written in Cyrillic since the 1940s. The inventory is the Russian alphabet of thirty-three letters plus two that Russia has no use for: Ө ө and Ү ү. Those two letters carry Mongolian vowels that no Russian word contains, and they are the first visible sign that you are not looking at Russian.

Here is the order, which is the order of every Mongolian dictionary, index and phone list you will ever use:

А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О Ө П Р С Т У Ү Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я

Ө sits immediately after О, and Ү immediately after У. That placement is a useful hint about what the letters are: not decorated versions of their neighbours, but separate vowels that happen to be alphabetised next to them.

The six letters that fool an English eye

The real difficulty of this alphabet is not the unfamiliar shapes. It is the familiar ones. Six letters look exactly like Latin letters and say something else, and because your eye recognises them instantly, you will read them wrong for weeks without noticing.

• Н is n, not h. ном [nom] (book) is not "hom".
• Р is r, not p. бар [bar] (tiger) is not "bap".
• С is s, not c. сайн [sain] (good) is not "cain".
• В is v, not b. давс [davs] (salt) is not "dabs".
• У is u, not y. улс [uls] (state, country) is not "yls".
• Х is kh, not x. хол [khol] (far) is not "xol".

Spend your first sitting on these six alone. Write out a dozen short words containing them and read them aloud until the wrong reading stops arriving first. Everything else in the alphabet is a matter of memory; these six are a matter of unlearning.

Do not import Russian sound values

If you have met Cyrillic through Russian, you have a second habit to break. The letters were borrowed; the sounds were not. Four cases matter.

• ж in Russian is the sound in the middle of "measure". In Mongolian it is the j of "jam": жил [jil] (year).
• з in Russian is the z of "zoo". In Mongolian it is a single affricate, closer to the ds of "beds": зам [zam] (road).
• г in Russian has one value. In Mongolian it has two, and which one you get depends on the vowel that follows.
• е, ё, ю, я behave roughly as in Russian, but they are far rarer in Mongolian words than a Russian reader expects, and ё is almost confined to a handful of items such as ёр [yor] (omen).

The detail of all this belongs to the sound pages: see Mongolian consonants for the two values of г and for what з and ц actually are, and Mongolian vowels for the vowel inventory.

How this guide romanises Mongolian

Almost everywhere in this guide, Mongolian is quoted in Cyrillic alone. A romanisation follows in square brackets on five pages only: this one, the three other sound pages — the vowels, the consonants and why spoken Mongolian does not sound like the spelling — and the paradigm tables of the seven cases, because a table that never shows what a letter or an ending stands for is no table at all. The system below is the one used on those five pages, and it is explained here and nowhere else.

Three decisions in that table are deliberate and worth knowing about.

• Long vowels are doubled, exactly as in Cyrillic. сүү [süü] (milk), хөдөө [khödöö] (countryside), аав [aav] (father). No colons, no macrons. Doubling mirrors the spelling, which is what a beginner needs.
• у and ү are kept apart as u and ü, and likewise о and ө as o and ö. Any system that writes both members of a pair the same way teaches you to confuse two different words.
• й is written i, not y, so that y is free for ы: сайн [sain] (good) against номын [nomyn] (of the book). The diphthongs therefore come out as ai, ei, oi, ui, üi.

The brackets are a scaffold, not a destination. Once you can read a word of five letters without them, drop them; outside the five pages listed above they are gone from the guide for exactly that reason.

The vowel letters, with examples

Two notes on that list. Ы never begins a word; you will meet it almost entirely inside endings, above all the genitive номын, treated on the genitive page. And Й, which the alphabet places among the vowels by shape, is not one at all; it is handled with the consonants below.

The consonant letters, with examples

The borrowed letters: к, ф, щ — and п

Four letters sit apart. к, ф and щ do not occur in words of Mongolian origin at all. They exist so that borrowings can be spelled: кино [kino] (cinema), компани [kompani] (company), фабрик [fabrik] (factory), Канад [Kanad] (Canada), Мексик [Meksik] (Mexico). Щ is the extreme case: it earns its place in the alphabet and appears only in Russian words carried over whole.

П is different, and the difference is worth stating because reference lists usually lump it in with the other three. It is rare in native vocabulary, not absent from it. It turns up in a small set of descriptive words such as пагдгар (squat, stocky), and in exclamations — Пөөх [Pöökh] is a noise of surprise, not a loan from anywhere.

Practical consequence: if a word contains к, ф or щ, you can be almost certain it came in from Russian, Chinese or Tibetan, and you can often guess it before you can read it.

Ъ and Ь: two letters with no sound of their own

Neither sign is a vowel or a consonant. Each does a job to the letters around it.

The soft sign ь is the one you will meet constantly, and it is not decoration. It changes the final consonant, and with it the word:

• тав [tav] (five) against тавь [tav'] (fifty)
• бар [bar] (tiger) against барь [bar'] (catch it!)
• ам [am] (mouth) against амь [am'] (life)

It is also simply part of many ordinary words: морь [mor'] (horse), хонь [khon'] (sheep), хорь [khor'] (twenty), сургууль [surguul'] (school). Treat it as a letter you must copy, never omit.

The hard sign ъ is far narrower. You will see it in one place: between a stem and a final я or ё, in the form used to propose something — явъя [yavya] (let's go), гаръя [garya] (let's go out), уулзъя [uulzya] (let's meet). What that form means is a matter for Mongolian imperatives; here, only note that the sign separates the two parts and adds no sound. In the romanisation it leaves no trace.

One language, two scripts — and nothing to decide yet

Cyrillic is not the only alphabet Mongolian uses. The traditional vertical script, written in columns from top to bottom, is still the official writing system in Inner Mongolia, in China, and it is taught in schools in Mongolia as well. In Mongolia itself, though, the Cyrillic alphabet is what covers street signs, menus, maps, newspapers and text messages, and it is what this guide and the audio course use. A beginner has no choice to make: learn the thirty-five letters above, and come to the vertical script later, as a second reading skill rather than an alternative to the first. Which varieties of Mongolian use which script is set out on the dialects page.

What to do in your first week

Learn the alphabet by reading, not by reciting. Reciting thirty-five names teaches you an order; reading teaches you the letters. Take the words in the tables above, cover the brackets, and read down the column aloud. When you misread one, you will almost always have hit one of the six lookalikes, and that tells you where the work is.

Expect one more surprise, and do not treat it as your mistake: a Mongolian word read letter by letter and the same word said at speed are not the same object. Short vowels after the first syllable shrink, and final vowels almost vanish. That gap has a page of its own — why spoken Mongolian does not sound like the spelling — and it is the reason the letters are worth learning quickly and then listening past.

Beyond the method: the letter names

One block of information on this page does not come from the method behind these pages. The method presents the thirty-five letters with their sounds and never names them, so the names below are taken from reference descriptions of the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet instead. They are useful the first time somebody spells a name at you, and nothing else on this page depends on them.

Vowels are named by their own sound: а, о, ө, у, ү, э, и. Most consonants are named with a following э — бэ, вэ, гэ, дэ, жэ, зэ, пэ, тэ, фэ, хэ, цэ, чэ — while five are named with a preceding one: эл, эм, эн, эр, эс. A few fall outside both patterns: к is ка, ш is ша, щ is ща. And three letters have descriptive names: й is хагас и [khagas i] (half i), ъ is хатуугийн тэмдэг (the hard sign), and ь is зөөлний тэмдэг (the soft sign).