Is Mongolian Related to Russian or Chinese?

The question is asked constantly, and for good reasons: the language sits between Russia and China, it is written in what look like Russian letters, and it is spoken in a part of the world that English-language education treats as one undifferentiated block. All three impressions are misleading, and the mistake is worth clearing up before you start, because what you expect a language to be related to determines what you try to transfer into it — and transferring the wrong thing costs months.

What Mongolian is actually related to

монгол хэл (the Mongolian language) is the principal member of the Mongolic family, which originated on the Mongolian plateau. Its relatives are languages you have probably never heard spoken: Buryat, north of the border in Siberia; Kalmyk and the Oirat varieties to the west; the varieties of Inner Mongolia; and a scatter of smaller Mongolic languages in western China. Across all its varieties the family counts something like five to six million speakers, most of them in Mongolia itself.

That is the whole list. There is no European branch, no Chinese branch, no relative with a literature you can read. The practical consequence is blunt: you will not recognise a single word. An English speaker learning Spanish gets thousands of words half-free; an English speaker learning Mongolian gets almost none, and the few familiar ones are twentieth-century loans. What you do get in exchange is a grammar with very little arbitrariness in it, which is the trade discussed on is Mongolian hard to learn.

The variety taught in this guide is Khalkha, the standard of Mongolia; the others, and how far apart they really are, are on Khalkha and the other varieties.

Why people think it is Russian: the alphabet

Mongolian today is written in Cyrillic, and that is a twentieth-century administrative decision, not a family resemblance. The Cyrillic script was imposed by government decree in 1941, in a country then closely tied to the Soviet Union, and the changeover took the rest of the decade — you will also see 1946 given as the date, which is when the new letters took over the press. As a literacy programme it worked spectacularly: the literacy rate rose from 17.3 per cent to 73.5 per cent between 1941 and 1950. Before that, and for seven centuries, Mongolian was written in a vertical script descended from the alphabet of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia, adopted in the era when Genghis Khan gathered the peoples of the steppe. That script is still taught in Mongolia, and it is the official script of Inner Mongolia in China — see the vertical script.

A writing system is a technology that can be swapped. Turkish is written in Latin letters and is not related to English; Vietnamese is written in Latin letters and is related to neither. The letters tell you who the government was dealing with, not who the ancestors were. Which letters Mongolian uses, which ones Russian does not have, and above all which Russian sound values you must not import when you read them, are dealt with on the Cyrillic alphabet — that last point matters, because the single most common beginner's error is reading Mongolian aloud with Russian habits.

What Russian did leave behind: words, not grammar

Decades of close contact did deposit vocabulary. такси (taxi) and пиво (beer) are cited in the method behind this guide; машин (car, machine) comes from Russian машина. You will meet more of these in the capital, in technical fields and in anything invented after about 1920.

This is exactly the shape that borrowing takes, and it is how linguists tell borrowing from kinship. Loanwords cluster in modern and technical vocabulary, arrive late, and leave the grammar untouched. Kinship shows up in the opposite place: in the pronouns, the numerals, the body parts, the kinship terms and the grammatical machinery. On that test Mongolian and Russian are not related at all — and nothing in the Mongolian case system, which is the part of the language that most resembles Russian from a distance, behaves the way a Russian case behaves.

One row of that table is worth a second look. Russian has no articles either, so a Russian speaker learning English struggles exactly where you will not have to: no "a" and no "the" is a difficulty running in the other direction.

Why people think it is Chinese: the map

Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family, and the two languages are no closer to each other than either is to English. They are also opposites in the way they are built. Chinese is an isolating language: grammar is carried by word order and by separate words, a word does not change shape, and the syllable carries a tone that distinguishes meanings. Mongolian is the other extreme: a word changes shape constantly as suffixes are added, and tone plays no part in the lexicon. There are no tones to learn in Mongolian, and no characters — Mongolian in China is written in the vertical Mongolian script, not in Chinese characters.

Contact has left its deposit here too, and it is older than the Russian layer. гуанз (canteen, cheap restaurant) comes from Mandarin 館子. цай (tea) goes back to Chinese 茶 in the end, but it reached Mongolian by a long road and most probably through Persian — which is itself a good illustration of how little a shared word proves about a shared ancestor.

There is one genuine structural resemblance, and it is a useful one to notice. Mongolian asks a yes-or-no question by adding a particle at the end of the clause rather than by moving words around, which is what Mandarin does with ma and Japanese with ka: Энэ таны ах уу? (Is this your older brother?). See the question particles. Resemblance of that kind, in a widely-found device, is not evidence of kinship — but it is evidence that you should stop expecting the English question machinery.

How a loanword travels, and why it proves nothing

It is worth seeing one of these journeys in full, because it settles the question better than any argument. The commonest noun in this entire guide is ном (book). It is not a native Mongolian word. It came into Mongolian from Old Uyghur, which had taken it from Sogdian, an Iranian language of the Silk Road, which had taken it from Ancient Greek nomos, "law" — the same Greek word that gives English "autonomy" and "economy". It arrived with Buddhist scripture, which is why it still means book, doctrine and religious law all at once.

So Mongolian and English do share that one word, through an ancestor neither of them has. That is what borrowing looks like: a word changes hands between unrelated languages because goods, religions and administrations change hands. Kinship is a different claim altogether, and it is tested in a different place — on regular sound correspondences running through the basic vocabulary and the grammatical endings, not on any single striking word. Mongolian passes that test with Buryat and Kalmyk. It fails it with Russian, with Chinese, and with English.

The Altaic question, answered honestly

You will run into the word "Altaic". For most of the twentieth century, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic — and in the bolder versions Korean and Japanese as well — were grouped together as one family under that name, and plenty of older books still present it as settled. It is not settled; a majority of comparative linguists now treat the common-origin claim as obsolete. The shared features are real, but they look like the result of two thousand years of neighbours borrowing from neighbours: a contact area, not a family tree.

For a learner the distinction matters less than the consequence, which is concrete. If you have studied Turkish, Korean or Japanese, Mongolian will feel structurally familiar from the first week: suffixes stacking in a fixed order, the verb at the end, no gender, no person agreement, modifiers in front of their noun, and in the Turkish case vowel harmony as well. Several of the obstacles that cost an English speaker the most are already paid for. What you still pay in full is the vocabulary, because contact in grammar did not come with shared words.

What all this means for an English speaker

• If you read Russian, you get the letter shapes almost free, and nothing else: keep the shapes and distrust the sounds, which is what the Cyrillic alphabet goes through letter by letter.
• If you speak Chinese, forget the writing system entirely and keep one habit: you are already used to a final question particle and to a language that does not conjugate for person.
• If you have only English, expect no free vocabulary and budget accordingly. The system itself is regular and compact, which is why this guide can set out the whole grammar page by page; the words have to be earned one at a time, which is what how long it takes is about.