Khalkha, Inner Mongolian and the Other Varieties

One language, more than one standard

English has one language with several national standards: British, American, Australian, Indian. Mongolian has something similar, but with two complications an English speaker does not expect. The standards are written in different alphabets, and some of the varieties usually counted as Mongolian are also counted by other linguists as separate languages.

The practical shape of the situation is this. In the state of Mongolia, the standard is based on Khalkha and written in Cyrillic. In Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China, the standard is based on a different dialect and written in the traditional vertical script. In Russia, two further varieties — Buryat and Kalmyk — have their own written norms and their own Cyrillic alphabets, and are often treated as languages in their own right.

This page maps that out and then tells you what it costs you, which is less than you would think.

Khalkha: the variety on these pages

Халх (Khalkha) is the name of the largest Mongolian group and of the speech associated with it. It is the Mongolian of Улаанбаатар (Ulaanbaatar) and of the large majority of Mongolia's population: the language of radio and television, of schooling, of road signs, of the market and of the national press.

Two things follow from that, and both matter to a learner.

First, the Cyrillic spelling system is built on Khalkha — specifically on the central variety of it. That is why the alphabet described on the Cyrillic alphabet page fits Khalkha so closely: the letters were chosen to write this variety, not a compromise between several.

Second, Khalkha is what dictionaries, grammars, textbooks and audio courses in English teach, almost without exception. If you learn Khalkha you can use every resource that exists. If you set out to learn one of the other varieties from English-language materials, you will quickly run out of them.

The audio course this guide accompanies teaches Khalkha, and every form quoted on these pages is a Khalkha form.

Inside Khalkha: three subdialects

Khalkha itself is not uniform. A common classification divides Khalkha within Mongolia into three subdialects: central, western and eastern. The orthography of Mongolian Cyrillic rests essentially on the central variety, which includes the speech of the capital.

For a learner this is background rather than a problem. The differences between the three are of the order of the differences between the English of Manchester and the English of Bristol: audible to a local, irrelevant to a beginner, and not reflected in the spelling. Nobody will mishear you because your vowels came from a textbook.

Across the border: the varieties of Inner Mongolia

Inner Mongolia is a region of China, and it has more ethnic Mongols in it than Mongolia has people. Its Mongolian is written in the traditional vertical script; Cyrillic was never adopted there.

Two of its dialects are worth knowing by name.

Chakhar is the basis of standard Mongolian in China: the variety of the broadcasts, the schoolbooks and the official documents. It is, as a spoken dialect, a small one — on the order of a hundred thousand native speakers — which is the usual fate of varieties chosen as standards for reasons of history rather than weight of numbers.

Khorchin, spoken in the east of Inner Mongolia and in neighbouring parts of Manchuria, is the opposite case: it has well over a million first-language speakers, which makes it the largest Mongolian dialect in China, and it is not the standard.

Alongside these sit a long list of further varieties — Baarin, Ordos, Üdzümüchin, Keshigten, Sünit, Darkhad, Khamnigan and others. Several of the dialects spoken on the Inner Mongolian side belong, by descent, to the Khalkha group, and are transitional in practice: they carry influence from the Khorchin type as well. The point for a beginner is not the list but its shape. Dialect boundaries and political boundaries do not coincide, and "Khalkha" is not a synonym for "spoken in Mongolia".

Buryat, Oirat and Kalmyk: dialect or language?

Here the terminology becomes genuinely unsettled, and it is worth knowing why before you read two sources that contradict each other.

Buryat is spoken in eastern Russia — above all in the Republic of Buryatia, around Lake Baikal — and also in northern Mongolia and in northeastern China. It has roughly 440,000 native speakers. It is written in Cyrillic, with the Russian alphabet extended by three letters: ү, ө and the letter һ, which Mongolian does not have. Two of those three are the same two letters that Mongolian added to Russian Cyrillic, which tells you how closely the two writing systems are related.

Oirat, the western group, is spoken in western Mongolia, in Russia and in China. Kalmyk is the Oirat variety of Kalmykia, on the lower Volga in Russia, and it too has its own Cyrillic alphabet, likewise extended beyond the Russian one.

Are these dialects of Mongolian or separate languages? The honest answer is that the question is disputed and that the dispute is not really about linguistics. Some classifications list Khalkha, Chakhar, Oirat and Buryat as four standard forms of one language. The current international standard treats Buryat and Oirat as separate Mongolic languages, not as varieties of Mongolian. Both positions are defensible, because the varieties form a chain: neighbours understand each other, and the ends of the chain do not.

What is not disputed is the family tree in outline. The split between the eastern group — Khalkha, Buryat and the dialects of Inner Mongolia — and the western group of Oirat and Kalmyk came later than the split that separated the more peripheral, conservative Mongolic languages from the central core. Buryat sits on the eastern side of that division, with Khalkha, which is why a Khalkha speaker finds Buryat markedly easier going than Kalmyk.

What actually differs

The script

This is the largest practical difference by a wide margin, and the one most likely to affect you. Mongolian written in Cyrillic and Mongolian written in the vertical script are the same language in two alphabets, as Serbian is in Cyrillic and Latin. Learning to read one teaches you nothing about reading the other. A Cyrillic reader standing in front of a shop sign in Hohhot is illiterate, and that has nothing to do with dialect.

The words that came in from outside

The second difference is vocabulary, and it has a simple cause: the two halves of the Mongolian-speaking world have spent a century borrowing from different neighbours. Mongolia's twentieth-century loanwords are overwhelmingly Russian — the words for technology, administration, education and sport. Inner Mongolia's are overwhelmingly Chinese. Two speakers can therefore agree completely about grammar and still fail to understand each other's word for a piece of office equipment.

Sounds that shifted

The third difference is in the sounds, and the clearest illustrations are words you already know. Buryat has an h, written with its own letter һ, in places where Mongolian has an s: at the start of a word, and also between vowels inside one. Where Mongolian begins a word with ц, Buryat usually has a plain s instead.

Read the table across and you can see what a sound correspondence looks like from the inside. In the first row the h stands at the front of the Buryat word; in the other two it has moved inside, and the Buryat and Kalmyk forms are longer because they keep a final syllable that the Mongolian dictionary form has shed. The words are the same words; the sounds have moved in a regular way. An English speaker who has noticed that English foot matches German Fuß, and English water German Wasser, already knows how to read a table like this one.

There are also differences in the consonants within the Mongolian-speaking area itself, which is why the same Mongolic word can begin with a different sound on either side of a border. These are of real interest to a linguist and of almost none to a beginner, who needs one set of sounds in the mouth before comparing two.

What does not differ: the grammar on these pages

This is the part worth remembering if you remember nothing else from this page.

Almost everything in this guide describes the whole language, not one dialect of it. The suffix machine, the seven cases, the agglutination, the verb built out of participles and converbs, the verb at the end of the sentence, the absence of articles and of grammatical gender, the postpositions, the question particles — all of that is Mongolic structure. It holds in Khalkha, it holds in Chakhar, it holds, with differences of form, in Buryat and Kalmyk too.

What varies between varieties is at the surface: which vowel an ending takes, which of two endings is preferred, how a consonant is pronounced, which borrowed word is used for a modern object. What does not vary is the architecture. Learn Khalkha properly and you have not learned a dialect; you have learned a language, with one accent.

If you want a sense of what the architecture costs to acquire, the obstacles are ranked in order of real expense on is Mongolian hard to learn for English speakers, and the time it takes is estimated on how long does it take to learn Mongolian.

Beyond the method

One note on sources, because this page is unusual in the guide. The method on which these pages are based teaches Khalkha and states that it does so; it names Халх as the main group, and it describes the two scripts and where each is used. It does not contain a survey of the other varieties. The dialect names, the speaker figures, the classification dispute and the Buryat and Kalmyk forms in the table above therefore come from reference grammars and dictionaries of the Mongolic languages, not from the method, and they are given here because a reader who meets the word "Mongolian" in three different senses deserves to be told why.

None of that material is used in the exercises as a grammatical claim, and none of the Buryat or Kalmyk forms above is a Mongolian form. They are quoted as comparisons and marked as such; do not learn them as vocabulary.

So which variety should you learn?

Khalkha, in Cyrillic, unless you have a specific reason not to — and the reasons that count are few and easy to recognise.

• You are going to Mongolia, or you have Mongolian friends or family from Mongolia. Khalkha, in Cyrillic. This is the overwhelmingly common case.
• Your interest is in Inner Mongolia. Learn Khalkha anyway for the spoken language, because that is where the materials are, and add the vertical script. The grammar transfers; the alphabet does not.
• Your interest is Buryat or Kalmyk specifically — a family connection, a region, a body of texts. Then learn that variety, and know that you will be working from Russian-language materials for the most part.
• You want to read thirteenth-century sources. That is Middle Mongol, and it is a historical study with its own apparatus, not a variety you can speak to anyone.

And a last reassurance, because it is the question people actually mean when they ask about dialects. Yes, you will be understood. A learner speaking careful Khalkha is intelligible across Mongolia and understood, with some adjustment on both sides, by Mongolian speakers in Inner Mongolia. The alphabet will trip you before the dialect does.