Mongolian, or Монгол хэл (pronounced: mongol khel), is an Altaic language and more specifically, a Mongolic language that comes from Middle Mongol, which comes from Proto-Mongolic, and originates from Pre-Proto-Mongolic which of course all gets umbrella by the Altic language family. 

Currently, it’s estimated that there are about 7 million speakers of Mongolian with the majority of them living in Mongolia and Inner China.

You should be aware Mongolian has two alphabets, so if you’re going to learn Mongolian you need to decide which script to learn; you can choose between classic Mongolian script or Cyrillic. The classic Mongolian script is written from top to bottom and left to right.

Now let’s turn our attention to the actual Mongolian language. The first thing to note about Mongolian is the two scripts it uses: Cyrillic, and Traditional. The Cyrillic alphabet is most commonly seen, but you can find communities that still utilize the traditional script in Inner Mongolia and various parts of China.

After the Mongolian government got rid of the traditional script in 1941, Mongolian began to be written in the Cyrillic alphabet (it was in the Latin script for 2 months). There isn’t much difference between Mongolian-Cyrillic and Russian-Cyrillic except that Mongolian added 2 new letters: Ө (oo as in boo), and Ү (Pronounced ‘You’).

The traditional script on the other hand is not so easy to understand for many Western language speakers. The first thing to note is that it is written from top to bottom and left to right–the only language of this kind. Calligraphy is a common practice, and they look pretty pleasant with lots of curves. 

What is vowel harmony? Simply put, it’s a linguistic phenomenon in which vowels of a language are broken down into subclasses (e.g., front and back vowels). In Mongolian, the vowel in the first syllable of a word will decide what vowels should be utilized in the following syllables.