Mongolian

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

A significant feature of Mongolian phonology is that vowel sounds are divided into front (+ATR), back (-ATR), and neutral groups (see harmony). The front and back distinction has to do with the position of the tongue root (ATR means Advanced Tongue Root). The phonology is more complicated, and sounds are somewhat more fluid than described here. See the sources for more detailed information.

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b	d t			k ɡ	ɢ
affricate		t͡s d͡z	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ
fricative	f	s ɮ	ʃ		x
nasal	m	n			ŋ
approximant	w			j
trill/flap		r

Some phonological transcriptions use t and tʰ where others use d and t for the same sounds, respectively. Similar contrasts are applied to the bilabial and affricate pairs in the repertoire (but not to the k/g pairing). Here we use the latter, partly because it is probably better indicative to the non-expert of the approximate sounds involved, and also because that corresponds with the Cyrillic letters used.

Other sources also indicate palatised versions of most consonants (eg. tʲ and mʲ) in a table such as this, but they are not shown here. Palatalisation appears to be restricted to words containing -ATR (back) vowelswm,#Consonants.

Tone

Mongolian is not a tonal language.

Structure

The basic unit of text is a word, however words can contain prefixes and suffixes.

Syllables tend to follow the pattern:

(C)V(V)(C)(C)(C)

Long vowels only occur in initial syllables. Mongolian has a strong tendency to reduce non-initial short vowels, either to epenthetic remnants or to zero. Non-initial vowels written as long are pronounced with normal length. See reduction.

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

These are nominal pronunciations that don't take into account vowel harmony or vowel reduction. The vowels with IPA beginning j.. have transcriptions for standalone contexts; after a consonant the j generally transmutes to ʲ in the sense that it palatalises the consonant.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowel harmony

Vowel harmony is an important aspect of the Mongolian language. Vowels are classed under one of the following 3 types:

• +ATR (also called +front, or feminine)
• -ATR (also called back, or masculine)
• neutral

ATR stands for Advanced Tongue Root.

A native word that begins with a -ATR vowel continues with only -ATR and/or neutral vowels. A word beginning with +ATR vowels continues with only +ATR and/or neutral vowels. Foreign loan words don't follow this pattern, and compound words (especially place names) may be made up of two words of different type, eg. Cүхбаатар

The +ATR vowel letters are:

The -ATR vowel letters are:

The following vowel letter is neutral, and can appear in words with either +ATR or -ATR vowels.

Grammatical suffixes usually also have +ATR and -ATR versions.

Vowel stress & reduction

For non-stressed, non-initial syllables, some sources group consonants into those which need to be preceded or followed by a vowel:

And those which don't:

However, Mongolian pronunciation can still appear to be very different from the written text because unstressed vowels are typically reduced or omitted when a word is pronounced, eg.

хадгалагдах

Word stress always falls on the first syllable of a Mongolian word, unless there are long vowels or diphthongs later in the word, in which case those take the stress.

The first vowel in a word is never reduced, even if unstressed, eg.

цагдаа

харандаа

If there is more than one long vowel, the first long vowel is long, and the second is short, but not otherwise reduced, eg.

хаашаа

Different rules apply to foreign loan words, eg.

автобyс

машин

Observation: Sometimes vowels appear to move to places they are not in the orthography, eg. ойлгосон

Observation: Also, ioticised vowels may lose the second part of their sound, resulting in a remnant that sounds like j, eg. баярлалаа баяртай

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

The left column is lowercase, and the right uppercase.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Mongolian consonants

The Mongolian language has a basic set of 16 consonants.

г represents either ɡ or ɢ. In words with +ATR (front/feminine) vowels (үэө) it is always ɡ. In words with −ATR (-ATR/masculine) vowels (уоа) it is ɢ unless it occurs in syllable-final position, when it normally reverts to ɡ (but see syllable_final).wc

Foreign sounds

п, ф and к are usually only used for foreign loan words, and the latter two may be pronounced pʰ and x, respectively.wc

щ is only used for Russian words.wc

Diacritics

Typically, Cyrillic Mongolian text will use no combining marks at all. However, when the text is decomposed, the letters й and ё become 0438 0306 and 0435 0308.

Hard & soft signs

ь does one of two things:ng

• separates е from a +ATR verb stem ending with a consonant, eg. хэлье өгье
• softens hard consonants, eg. морь хууль хорь

This may result in a short ĭ sound, eg. арьс амьтан

ъ is only used to separate я and ё from a -ATR verb stem ending with a consonant,ng eg. явъя уулзъя бодъё

Finals

A number of consonants change their sound in final position. These include:

In a number of words, the syllable-final sound change is prevented by following the consonant with a mute, syllable-final vowel letterwc, eg. халбага энэ

Consonant clusters & gemination

Because the script is alphabetic, there are no special mechanisms for representing clusters of consonants without intervening vowels, or doubled consonants.

Consonant sounds to characters

Currency

The Mongolian unit of currency is the tugrik, formerly subdivided into 100 möngö. The standard abbreviation is MNT, and the currency symbol is ₮.

Letterform slopes, weights, & italics

Cyrillic doesn't normally have any of the changeability of complex scripts. Characters are typically separate and self-contained. However, there can be a significant difference in shape between regular and italic/cursive font shapes for the same character.

Note in particular the italic form of т in the figure just above, which looks similar to the italic form of м shown in the previous figure.

The shapes of the italic forms can also vary by language.w

The shape of the breve sign in Cyrillic is different from that used for Latin text.s A font such as Brill can detect the appropriate shape from the adjacent characters.

Case & other character transforms

Cyrillic is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

Cyrillic Mongolian graphemes are straightforward, and can be mapped to Unicode grapheme clusters.

Grapheme clusters

Base (Combining_mark)*

The 2 combining marks that occur in Cyrillic Mongolian appear only on the rare occasions when the text is decomposed, and only one combining mark at a time appears after any base. All such decompositions conform to Unicode grapheme clusters.

Click on the text version of this word to see more detail about the composition.

	лийр
	(decomposed)

Phrase & section boundaries

The cyrillic orthography uses ASCII punctuation.

Quotations & citations

The standard approach is to use angle brackets by default, and the quotation marks for nested quotes. An alternative is to use the quotation marks at the top level.wq

For dialogue, the quotation dash is commonly used to introduce the spoken text, but also to terminate it before identifying the speaker. — could be used for this, with spaces around it.wq

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Line breaking & hyphenation

Spaces between words provide the primary line break opportunities.u

Text alignment & justification

Justification is done, principally, by adjusting the space between words.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Cyrillic uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

Cyrillic has little in the way of ascenders and descenders, and mostly the font metrics are the same as for ASCII text. One difference is the use of a couple of diacritics, which rise above the ASCII ascender height in capital letters..

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Cyrillic glyphs from Noto fonts.

fig_baselines_other shows similar comparisons for the Doulos SIL and Helvetica fonts.