The Mongolian Latin script (

Mongolian Cyrillic The Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet ( Mongolian: , or , ) is the writing system used for the standard dialect of the Mongolian language in the modern state of Mongolia. It has a largely phonemic orthography, meaning that there is a fair degree o ...

: , ; Mongolian Latin: ;

Traditional Mongolian script The classical or traditional Mongolian script, also known as the , was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most widespread until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. It is traditionally written ...

: ; ) was officially adopted in

Mongolia Mongolia; Mongolian script: , , ; lit. "Mongol Nation" or "State of Mongolia" () is a landlocked country in East Asia, bordered by Russia to the north and China to the south. It covers an area of , with a population of just 3.3 million ...

in 1931. In 1939, a second version of the Latin alphabet was introduced but not widely used, and was replaced by the

Cyrillic script The Cyrillic script ( ), Slavonic script or the Slavic script, is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking co ...

in 1941.

History

In the early 1930s, under the influence of

latinisation in the Soviet Union In the USSR, latinisation or latinization (russian: латиниза́ция, ') was the name of the campaign during the 1920s–1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for all languages of the Soviet Union with systems that wo ...

, a draft alphabet on a

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...

basis was developed in the

Mongolian People's Republic The Mongolian People's Republic ( mn, Бүгд Найрамдах Монгол Ард Улс, БНМАУ; , ''BNMAU''; ) was a socialist state which existed from 1924 to 1992, located in the historical region of Outer Mongolia in East Asia. It ...

. This alphabet was used in several articles in the Ynen newspaper, but did not receive official status. On 1 February 1 1941, Mongolia officially switched to a modified Latin alphabet, which was successfully used for some time to print books and newspapers. However, two months later, on March 25, this decision was canceled. According to official explanations, the adopted writing system was not well thought out: it did not cover all the sounds of the Mongolian language and was difficult to use. The adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet occurred almost simultaneously with the

Cyrillization Cyrillization or Cyrillisation is the process of rendering words of a language that normally uses a writing system other than Cyrillic script into (a version of) the Cyrillic alphabet. Although such a process has often been carried out in an ad h ...

in the Soviet Union, therefore, the rejection of the Latin alphabet could have been due to political considerations. In the Mongolian version of the Latin alphabet, there were additional letters ''ɵ'' (), ''ç'' (), ''ş'' () and ''ƶ'' (); ''Y'' corresponded to the Cyrillic . ''K'' transliterated the sound that would later come to be represented in Cyrillic by in native Mongolian words. The letters ''f, h, p, v'' were rarely used except in Russian loanwords, and ''q, w,'' and ''x'' were almost never used. Despite being neither widely promoted nor having any official status, Mongolians were increasingly using Latin script on smartphones and social networking services . In 1975, preparations began in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

for the romanization of Mongolian writing in Mongol areas based on the

pinyin Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in China, and to some extent, in Singapore and Malaysia. It is often used to teach Mandarin, normally written in Chinese f ...

system used for

Mandarin Chinese Mandarin (; ) is a group of Chinese (Sinitic) dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language o ...

. According to the plan, the Latin alphabet should have been introduced in 1977, but the death of

Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (P ...

and the changes in domestic policy that had begun did not allow the project to materialize. This system forms the basis of the SASM/GNC romanization of Mongolian that has been used in China to transcribe personal names and toponyms since 1978. 关于改用汉语拼音方案作为我国人名地名罗马字母拼写法的统一规范的报告. 国发［1978］192号. 中华人民共和国国务院

tate Council of the People's Republic of China Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the U ...

　26 September 1978.

Characters

First Latin alphabet was using "y" as feminine "u", with additional feminine "o" ("ɵ") and with additional consonants "ç" for "ch", "ş" for "sh" and " ƶ" for "j", it successfully served in printing books and newspapers. A few of the letters (f, k, p, v) were rarely used, being found only in borrowings, while q, w and x were excluded altogether. Since ''k'' transcribed in loans, it is unclear how loans in were written. "j" is used for vowel combinations of the atype. Letter "c" is used for the sound sand "k" is used for the sound The first version was inspired by the Yanalif script used for the Soviet Union's Turkic languages. The second version of Latin alphabet made few minor changes to make the way it works to look more familiar to European languages. That change was including replacement of "y" by "ü", "ɵ" by "ö", " ƶ" by "j", "j" by "y" and also "k" by "x" in native words. Also reduced the number of letters in the alphabet by erasing "ç" "ş" and write them as a combination of ch and sh. And the rest of the alphabet and orthography kept same.

List of characters

The unaspirated stops are often realized as voiced . The non-nasal sonorants are often devoiced to .

Text samples

Orthography

The orthography of the Mongolian Latin is based on the orthography of the Classical

Mongolian script The classical or traditional Mongolian script, also known as the , was the first writing system created specifically for the Mongolian language, and was the most widespread until the introduction of Cyrillic in 1946. It is traditionally written ...

. It preserves short final vowels. It does not drop unstressed vowels in the closing syllables when the word is conjugated. The suffixes and inflections without long or i-coupled vowels are made open syllables ending with a vowel, which is harmonized with the stressed vowel. The rule for the vowel harmony for unstressed vowels is similar to that of the Mongolian Cyrillic. It does not use consonant combinations to denote new consonant sounds. For both of the version, letter "b" is used both in the beginning and in the middle of the word. Because it phonetically assimilates into sound , no ambiguity is caused.

References

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Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern ...