Mongolian Vowels: Seven Short, Seven Long, and the Diphthongs

Seven short vowels, and no more

The system you have to acquire is small: а [a], э [e], и [i], о [o], ө [ö], у [u], ү [ü]. Seven letters, seven vowels, and no silent ones. Compared with English, where the letter a alone covers the vowels of "cat", "car", "cake", "call" and "about", Mongolian spelling is close to an honest record of the vowel you must produce.

Three of these give an English speaker almost no trouble. а is near the vowel of "father" cut short, э near the vowel of "bed", и near the vowel of "machine" cut short. The remaining four are the work of this page.

The two pairs an English ear merges

This is the single most expensive thing on the page, so it comes first. Mongolian holds apart two pairs that English does not distinguish at all:

• о against ө
• у against ү

English has one rounded back vowel region where Mongolian has two of each height. When an English speaker hears ном [nom] (book) and өдөр [ödör] (day), both vowels arrive filed under "o". When they hear улс [uls] (state) and үнэ [üne] (price), both arrive filed under "oo". That filing is wrong and it will stay wrong until you deliberately unfile it.

A description helps a little. For ү, say the vowel of "boot" and then push the tongue forward while keeping the lips rounded; the result is close to the German ü or the French u. For ө, do the same thing starting from the vowel of "bought"; the result is in the region of the German ö. у and о are the back members of each pair, made with the tongue drawn back and, for Mongolian speakers, a noticeable narrowing in the throat.

Two reasons to take this seriously. First, the pairs separate real words: ул [ul] (sole of a shoe) is not үүл [üül] (cloud). Second, the choice between о and ө, and between у and ү, decides the shape of every suffix the word takes. If you cannot hear which vowel a word contains, you cannot predict its endings. That machinery is set out on Mongolian vowel harmony.

Long vowels: write the letter twice

Every one of the seven vowels has a long counterpart, and Mongolian spelling marks length in the simplest way available: it writes the letter twice.

The last row is the odd one. Long i is not written ии but ий, with the letter й doing the lengthening. Read ий as a long i and you will be right: тийм [tiim] (yes), ерөнхий [yerönkhii] (chief, main).

For an English speaker, length is the easy half of this page and the half most often neglected. English has long and short vowels, but they differ in quality as well as duration — the vowels of "bit" and "beat" are two different sounds, not one sound held for two lengths. In Mongolian they genuinely are one sound held for two lengths, and the difference is as meaningful as a change of consonant.

Six pairs where length is the whole word

Nothing argues the point better than a list of words that differ by nothing else.

Read the right-hand column with a short vowel and you have said something else. There is no context that rescues you: a cow and a price, paper and snow, dust and butter are all perfectly plausible things to mention in the same conversation.

Long vowels and the endings that follow them

Length matters a second time when you start adding suffixes, and this is where learners who treat it as a detail of pronunciation get caught.

First, a long vowel does not shorten when an ending is attached, and it does not shorten at the end of a word either. хөдөө (countryside) keeps its long өө in хөдөөнөөс (from the countryside); the long vowel is still there and still long, and an extra consonant has appeared in front of the ending. Short vowels are far less stable, and in some words a short one drops out altogether when a suffix arrives. Both of those adjustments belong to how a Mongolian word is built, which is where the stacking rules live.

Second, the vowel of the suffix itself is chosen from the vowels already in the word, and a long vowel counts for this purpose exactly as its short counterpart does. хөдөө takes endings with ө; уул takes endings with а or у. The four-way table that lists those endings is on the four-form suffix table, and it exists in one place only.

Third, and this is the practical sting: you cannot choose an ending for a word whose vowels you have misheard. Hearing ө where the word has о will make you produce a wrong ending every single time that word is used. The vowel work is not aesthetic; it is grammatical.

The diphthongs

Mongolian has five diphthongs, and all of them are a vowel plus й:

ай [ai], эй [ei], ой [oi], уй [ui], үй [üi]

Where they stand in the word decides how much of them you hear.

At the beginning, in the middle, or in a word of one syllable, both parts are clear. цай [tsai] (tea), ой [oi] (forest), сайн [sain] (good), байр [bair] (flat, apartment), оймс [oims] (sock), уйтгар [uitgar] (sorrow), хойно [khoino] (north, behind), гүйцэтгэх [güitsetgekh] (to carry out). Here you can trust the spelling.

At the end of a word of more than one syllable, a diphthong settles into a single vowel, often a longish one, and the two parts stop being separately audible. малгай [malgai] (hat), далай [dalai] (ocean), баяртай [bayartai] (goodbye), нохой [nokhoi] (dog), эмэгтэй [emegtei] (woman). Final ай comes out close to the vowel of English "air" without the r; final ой comes out as a light e; final ий, as already noted, is simply a long i.

Two consequences for a beginner. You will hear words that sound as though they end in a single vowel and are spelled with two letters, and you must still write the two letters. And a very common ending, –тай and its relatives, falls under exactly this rule: it is spelled with a diphthong and said with a single vowel. What that ending does is the business of the comitative case.

и, the vowel that does not take sides

и is the odd vowel out. It belongs to neither of the two vowel sets described below, and its presence in a word tells you nothing about which endings the word will take. The method behind this guide calls it a neutral vowel, and that is the right label.

What that means in practice is that и can be set aside. It sits quite happily in a word alongside either of the two sets — малчин (herder) with а, хөгжим (music) with ө — and it never becomes the vowel that an ending has to agree with. How a word is sorted, and what happens when it holds vowels from both sets, is the subject of the vowel harmony page, not of this one.

What и cannot do is decide a word by itself. And when it is the only vowel a word has — их (big), the stem ир- (come) — the word is not left without a side: it takes the э ө ү endings, which is why the method's own forms are ирнэ and ирсэн. The rule that settles it is on the vowel harmony page.

Back and front: a label that teaches well and describes loosely

Every grammar of Mongolian, including the method this guide follows, sorts the vowels into two sets:

Learn the two columns; they are what the suffix system runs on. But you should also know what the labels are worth, because you will read other sources. Grammars call these two sets back and front; phonetically the real Khalkha contrast is pharyngeal, and ө and ү are front rounded vowels. The labels are a teaching convenience.

In plain terms: ө and ү are not made further forward in the mouth than о and у in some simple way that the words "front" and "back" would capture. What separates the two sets in Khalkha is a constriction in the throat, present in one set and absent in the other. The traditional labels sort the vowels into the right two groups, which is all a learner needs them to do, and they do not describe the sounds accurately. Keep using them; do not build a mouth position on them.

The rule that these two sets feed — one word, one set, and the suffix follows — is not on this page. It is on the vowel harmony page, with its exceptions a page further on.

What to work on, in order

Start with length, because it is mechanical and it pays immediately: read the six pairs above aloud until a short vowel and a long one feel like two different lengths rather than two different words you happen to know. Then work on ү against у and ө against о, which takes weeks of listening and is the one part of the Mongolian sound system that genuinely cannot be read off a page. Leave the diphthongs last; they look exotic and give almost no trouble.

And expect a gap between the vowels you have just learned and the vowels you will hear. Short vowels after the first syllable are reduced in ordinary speech, and a final vowel can be barely there at all. That is not your ear failing — it is a regular feature of the spoken language, described on why spoken Mongolian does not sound like the spelling, alongside where the stress falls.