Mongol Bichig: The Vertical Script, and When You Need It

What монгол бичиг is

монгол бичиг (Mongolian script) is the writing the Mongols have used for eight centuries. It is also called уйгаржин бичиг (the Uyghur script), and that second name says where it came from: the Mongols took it from the Old Uyghur alphabet, a Turkic script of Central Asia, in the early thirteenth century, around the years in which the empire was being assembled and the assembly of 1206 gave Temüjin the title Genghis Khan. A Chinese history of 1370 credits the spread of the alphabet to a Naiman scribe, Tatatonga, captured in 1204, who taught it to Genghis Khan's sons.

Three things make it look unlike anything an English reader has handled. It runs top to bottom, so a word is a vertical thread rather than a horizontal row. Its columns then run from left to right across the page — which is nearly unique: the other great vertical scripts of Asia start their columns on the right, and the Uyghur-derived family goes the other way because the script was turned a quarter-turn from an older horizontal ancestor. And its letters join up and change shape depending on where they stand, so each letter has one form at the start of a word, another inside it, another at the end. It is a true alphabet with separate letters for vowels and consonants — a little over two dozen of them — but you read a word as a connected shape, not as a line of beads.

Where each script is used today

Mongolia adopted Cyrillic in the 1940s, under Soviet influence, and that is the alphabet of the country's daily life: street signs, menus, newspapers, maps, text messages. It has thirty-five letters — the Russian set plus ө and ү, the two vowels Mongolian needed and Russian does not have. It is the alphabet this course teaches, and it is set out letter by letter on the page on the Cyrillic alphabet.

The vertical script never stopped being used. In Inner Mongolia, the Mongolian-speaking region inside China, it is the official script for the language, and anything written in Mongolian there is written in it. In Mongolia itself it is taught in school, used for formal and ceremonial documents, for certificates and letterheads, for logos and calligraphy, and for the decorative lettering you see on currency and public monuments — present everywhere as a mark of the language, and almost nowhere as the medium of an ordinary sentence. In March 2020 the government announced a programme to widen its use, with official documents to appear in both scripts from 2025.

So the honest summary for a traveller or a beginner, and the method's own position, is this: for Mongolia, Cyrillic is entirely sufficient. For Inner Mongolia it is not sufficient at all.

What the vertical script does not write down

This is the part that matters to a learner, and it is not usually the first thing said about the script. The vertical script is an old alphabet adapted from a language with a different sound system, and it leaves several Mongolian distinctions unwritten. It does not distinguish o from u. It does not distinguish ö from ü. At the end of a word it writes a and e with the same sign. At the start of a syllable it does not separate t from d, or k from g. In some positions it does not separate j from y.

Read that list against what Cyrillic does. The hardest pairs in Mongolian for an English ear are exactly о against ө and у against ү — four vowels, two distinctions, no English equivalent — and Cyrillic gives each of the four its own letter. The vertical script gives you two signs for those four sounds and expects you to know the word. Centuries of orthographic schools grew up around exactly that problem, and spelling a word correctly in монгол бичиг means knowing which word it is before you write it.

That is a strong practical argument for starting where this course starts. Cyrillic forces the distinctions into your eye. Once хөдөө (the countryside), сүү (milk) and чулуу (stone) are secure as written forms, you can later read a script that under-specifies them. Done in the other order, the script hides from you the one thing you most need to learn. What those four vowels are and how to keep them apart is on the page on the Mongolian vowels.

It spells the old language, and that explains your long vowels

The vertical script's spelling was fixed centuries ago and has barely moved since, so it records the language as it was rather than as it is. For a beginner that is normally a reason to leave it alone. But it also answers a question that Cyrillic raises and cannot settle: why is Mongolian so full of long vowels?

Where modern Cyrillic writes a long vowel, the old spelling very often has a vowel, then a consonant, then another vowel. Four examples, with the classical spelling written out in the Latin transliteration that scholars use for this script:

The ɣ in those forms stands for a g made far back in the throat. Between two vowels it stopped being pronounced, the two vowels ran together, and the result is the long vowel you now write with two letters. That is where a large share of Mongolian's long vowels come from, and it explains why they are so common, why they fall where they do, and why they carry so much of the burden of telling words apart. Not every word was affected: гэр (ger, home) is spelled the same way in both scripts.

One real grammatical difference: suffixes are written detached

Mongolian builds words by gluing suffixes onto a stem, and Cyrillic writes the result as one solid block: гэрээс (from home), номын (of the book), найзтайгаа (with one's own friend). You have to learn to see the seams, because the spelling does not show them.

The vertical script shows them. Case endings and plural endings are written detached from the stem, after a small gap, as separate written pieces that do not join to the word in front of them. A reader of монгол бичиг therefore sees the morpheme boundary that a reader of Cyrillic has to deduce.

Two things follow, and they are the most useful sentences on this page. First, the grammar is identical in both scripts: the same stem, the same suffixes, in the same fixed order, carrying the same meanings. Nothing you learn in this course has to be relearned for the other script. Second, the detached writing is a reminder of how the language is actually put together — which is the subject of how a Mongolian word is built and of the order in which suffixes stack. If you can split найруулагчдаас into its pieces in Cyrillic, you are already reading the way the vertical script writes.

What learning it would actually involve

It is a second literacy task on top of a language, and it is honest to say how big it is.

• Three shapes per letter. You learn each letter initial, medial and final, and you learn the joins, because a word is one connected stroke.
• Whole-word recognition. Because of the unwritten distinctions above, you cannot always sound a word out. You recognise it, as a reader of English recognises yacht.
• A new reading direction. Downwards, with columns advancing to the left-hand side first. This is a habit, not a rule, and habits take weeks.
• Classical spelling. If you read older or formal material, you are reading forms that no longer match the pronunciation you have learned, with the correspondences to work out.
• Technical friction. Fonts, keyboards and vertical layout are still awkward on ordinary devices.

Against that, the grammatical return is zero. The script teaches you no rule of Mongolian that you do not already need, and it adds nothing to the seven cases, the verb forms or the particles. It is a reading skill, and it should be chosen as one.

When you need it

You need the vertical script if you intend to read material published in Inner Mongolia, where it is the only script in use; if you want to read pre-twentieth-century Mongolian, which exists in no other form; if you work with calligraphy, seals, logos or traditional documents; or if you want to read the formal and decorative lettering that surrounds you in Mongolia even though the sentence next to it is in Cyrillic.

You do not need it to learn to speak Mongolian, to understand its grammar, to read a newspaper or a street sign in Ulaanbaatar, or to follow this course. A beginner is not choosing between two scripts; the beginner's job is Cyrillic, then the language, and then the second script if there is a reason for it.

The sensible order of work, then: learn the Cyrillic alphabet, which is the cheapest obstacle in the language and takes about a week; get the sound system and the suffix machine working, starting with vowel harmony; and come back to монгол бичиг when you have a text in it that you want to read. If you are weighing up what Mongolian will cost you overall, the obstacles are ranked by real difficulty on is Mongolian hard to learn; and the question of which varieties of Mongolian are written with which script belongs to the page on Khalkha and the other varieties.