Mongolian

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Separator & 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.

In non-stressed positions, most vowels fall back to ə or are elided. See diglossia.

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stops	p	t				ɡ	ɢ
aspirated	pʰ	tʰ				kʰ
palatalised	pʲ	tʲ				ɡʲ
aspirated & palatalised	pʲʰ	tʲʰ				kʲʰ
affricates		t͡s		t͡ʃ
aspirated		t͡sʰ		t͡ʃʰ
fricatives	f		s ɮ	ʃ		x
palatalised			ɮʲ			xʲ
nasals	m		n			ŋ
palatalised	mʲ		nʲ
approximants	w				j
palatalised	wʲ				j

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 former, because that is what Wiktionary uses for the IPA transcriptions included in the examples.

Palatalisation appears to be restricted to words containing -ATR (back) vowelswl,#Consonants.

Tone

Mongolian is not a tonal language.

Structure

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. Also, nominal shapes are shown; in practise, the shape will vary according to the joining context.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Basic vowels

Eight vowels are used for the Mongolian language.

The list shows canonical pronunciations for these vowels. In fact, in non-stressed positions most vowels fall back to ə or are omitted. See diglossia.

ᠧ is used for foreign words. 

As previously mentioned, vowel harmony is an important part of the orthography for the Mongolian language, and most of these vowels consist of contrasting pairs.

Glyphs vs. phonemes

Unicode encodes separate characters for the different sounds of the Mongolian language, regardless of whether the glyph shapes used are identical.

This is particularly, though not exclusively, relevant for vowel letters. For example, the glyph shapes for the 2 characters ᠣ and ᠤ are identical, as are those for ᠥ and ᠦ. The two pairs only differ in shape in isolated and initial forms.

Identical glyphs for different sounds occur across other pairings also. For example, the medial and final shapes for a and n are identical.

The Unicode Standard provides the following examples of word pairs that cannot be distinguished visually.u,530

Click on 'details', and then on each of the words to see and compare their actual composition.

The result of this encoding method is that it is impossible to accurately copy Mongolian text from a visual source unless you speak the language well enough to recognise the phonetics of the words involved. It also leads to mistakes when Mongolian speakers type text.

Final vowel separation

In some Mongolian words that end with ᠠ or ᠡ a special 'forward tail' glyph shape is used, and the glyph is slightly separated from the rest of the word (see fig_mvs). The shape of the previous letter may also change, when this occurs, depending on the letter and sometimes whether this is a traditional or modern orthography. Whether this special shaping is applied or not depends on the word – there are no rules to determine when to apply it.

The final letter is not a suffix, but is an integral part of the word, and line breaking, word selection, etc. should not split the start of the word from the last letter, even though there is a gap.

To achieve this effect in Unicode, it is currently necessary to use 180E immediately before the last letter. Click on the text in fig_mvs to see the sequence of characters.

Not used for Todo, Manchu or Sibe.

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

Nominal shapes are shown; in practise, the shape will vary according to the joining context. The finals shown are just a few that are dedicated finals, or whose pronunciation changes when syllable-final.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic Mongolian consonants

The Mongolian language has a basic set of 16 consonants.

Whereas the table just above takes you from sounds to letters, the following simply lists the basic consonant letters (however, since the orthography is highly phonetic there is little difference in ordering).

Glyph shaping

Each Mongolian letter tends to have multiple shapes, and the differences in glyph shape not solely dependent on the cursive interactions, as is the case in Arabic.

The choice of shape often depends on whether the letter is used in syllable-initial or syllable-final position. But there are typically differences between the shape used for a syllable-initial letter at the beginning of a word, and one that occurs within a word. A similar situation applies for syllable-final shaping: is the letter followed by more letters, or word final?

fig_syllable_shaping shows this for ᠨ.

Furthermore, a particular shape may be used before an MVS space, or after a NNBSP gap. All of this shaping should normally be handled automatically during the rendering process.

On the other hand, there are sometimes other, unpredictable changes in shape for letters in certain words. In this case, the content author needs to add an appropriate Free Variation Selector (FVS) formatting character after the letter to be shaped. See context.

QA and GA

In the current Mongolian encoding model, the code points ᠬ and ᠭ each have both masculine and feminine forms. The different forms have different shapes and different pronunciations.

The masculine form is used before a masculine vowel, and vice versa.

	masculine	feminine		masculine	feminine
initial
medial

The font is expected to automatically select the appropriate glyph form for these velar consonants. This becomes more complicated, however, where these consonants occur without a following vowel (ie. before another consonant, or in final position).

In Sibe and Manchu, the form is selected based on the previous vowel. In Mongolian and Todo, however, the shape depends on the gender of the word, as described in harmony, and this may not be detectable from the previous vowel. The Unicode Standard gives examples of 2 words where it is necessary to look at the beginning of the word to determine the shape at the end of the word.u,534

This puts a significant strain on the capabilities of the font itself and of the font developers, and some fonts do not achieve this correctly. In addition, exceptional circumstances have to be taken into account. In consequence, fonts may need 100 or more rules to handle this.

Suffixes

Many Mongolian suffixes are separated from the root or other suffixes by a small gap. Multiple suffixes may be attached to the word stem, each with their own initial gap. Characters following immediately following the gap may take on special shapes.

ᠵᠠᠷᠢᠮ ᠳᠠᠭᠠᠨ

Lines and word selections, etc. should not be broken where the gaps appear. The word and its suffixes should be kept together.

The Unicode Standard provides 202F (NNBSP) for this gap, which is thinner than a normal space, and prevents line-breaking. Fonts and rendering should automatically perform any special glyph shaping needed for the initial letter in the suffix.

Repertoire extension

The full set of consonants used for Mongolian includes 11 letters that are normally used for writing foreign sounds.

See a couple of examples below, but click on the items in the above list to see more.

ᠫᠢᠸᠣ᠋

ᠺᠣᠹᠧ

Consonants for other languages

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 length

No special mechanisms for representing doubled consonants

Consonant sounds to characters

Combining marks

The Mongolian block contains 3 visible combining characters.

It also contains 3 invisible control characters, also classed by Unicode as combining characters, which can be used to indicate specific alternative forms for letters. See Context-based shaping.

In horizontal contexts

When Mongolian excerpts are shown in text that is set horizontally (such as on this page), the Mongolian is sometimes represented as a sequence of single vertical words, eg. ᠮᠣᠩᠤᠯ
ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ, but in other cases it is rotated left and joins horizontally, eg. ᠮᠣᠩᠤᠯ ᠪᠢᠴᠢᠭ.

Mongolian text written horizontally is read left-to-right. This means that if it contains embedded text from another language, such as English, there is no bidirectional behaviour (as there would be in Arabic-script text).

Note also that it is not possible to produce a page of vertical text by printing it horizontally and then rotating the page, This is because the order of lines in the rotated page will be right-to-left, whereas it should be left-to-right.

Cursive shaping

Similarly to the Arabic script, Mongolian letters within a word tend to be joined cursively along the centre baseline, and the shapes of joined characters can vary significantly in various positions. Unlike Arabic, and many other cursive scripts, there are no characters that only join on one side.

Letters following a Mongolian suffix space may need to be displayed using a joining form, however that is not always the case. It depends on the suffix.

The base shape of a letter can change significantly, depending on the position in a word. On the other hand, a number of letters have adopted identical shapes in the same, or sometimes different joining contexts.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Certain letters ligate with adjacent letters.

In addition to the cursive shaping mentioned just above, individual letters may have context-dependent variant forms, that can be quite different from the standard forms. Where the alternative form can be determined algorithmically, the font should produce the change.

An unusual feature of the Mongolian traditional script is that the shape of a letter may depend on the vowel harmony of the word, and so may be determined at some distance from the character in question.

For unpredictable variants, the Mongolian block has three 'free variation selectors' which can be used to indicate which variant form should be used. The variant selector is used immediately after the character to be changed.

Unfortunately, variation selector usage is still not completely standardised across Mongolian fonts. For a set of tables summarising current standardisation proposals and major font support see Mongolian variant forms.

Word boundaries

The concept of 'word' is difficult to define in any language (see What is a word?). Here, a word is a vaguely-defined, but recognisable semantic unit that is typically smaller than a phrase and may comprise one or more syllables.

Words are separated by spaces. The gaps before certain suffixes are not considered to be word delimiters. Those gaps are usually created using 180E or 202F.

Compound words or names are sometimes hyphenated. In such cases ᠆ should be used (since it wraps to the beginning of a new line, unlike the ordinary hyphen which remains at the end of the first line – see hyphenation), eg.

ᠠᠯᠢ᠆ᠤᠮᠠᠷᠢ

Graphemes

Phrase & section boundaries

Mongolian uses a mixture of local punctuation and punctuation from Chinese.

Question marks and exclamation marks are fullwidth, upright characters (ee an example). Mongolian punctuation is horizontally centred in each vertical line.n,#punctuation_rules

Quotations & citations

A variety of brackets are used around quotations. Quotation marks are often fullwidth but may not be. Quotation marks are rotated, as in Chinese.g5

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

᠁ is used for ellipsis.

Inline notes & annotations

Like Chinese and Japanese, Mongolian text uses ruby annotations to express the pronunciation of words for beginners or in ambiguous situations. This is useful in Mongolian because many characters look identical in cursive text.

Annotations are typically written in the Latin script, and run down the right side of the line.g1

Other inline features

Underlines run down the right side of vertical lines of Mongolian text. Lines down the left side are equivalent to overline in English text.n,#h_text_decoration

The side of the vertical line for underlines doesn't change for embedded Latin text. Since Latin text runs down the page, this makes the underline run across the top of the Latin letters. See the red line in text_decoration_mixed.n,#h_text_decoration

There are a number of different styles of underlining in use, as shown in underline_styles.g10

If an underline is styled so that it leaves a gap below spaces that separate words, the underline should not also leave gaps below the narrow spaces used to separate some suffixes from the word root. The desired outcome is that shown here, however implementations may vary.g9

Line breaking & hyphenation

Line-breaking normally occurs at word boundaries (indicated by spaces). Words are not normally broken, but compound words separated by a hyphen can be broken before the hyphen (see hyphenation, just below).

Lines should also not break on gaps between words and their suffixes when separated by 202F, or where 180E is used.n,#mongolian_space

In-word line-breaks

Words are not normally broken across line endings.

However, compound words that contain hyphens may be split at the hyphen@MWG/2-N13,https://www.unicode.org/mwg/mwg2docs/mwg2-13Summaryimprovementstophonetic-RoozbehPournader.pdf. When that happens, however, the hyphen should move to the next line, and should not stay at the end of the current line.u,545

Unicode provides a special Mongolian hyphen for this: 1806, which should produce the correct line wrap behaviour. Despite the name, it is not a formatting character that becomes visible only at line breaks; it is always visible. It is also not specific to Todo.

Text alignment & justification

To justify the text on a line, the spaces between words are adjusted.

When Chinese characters are embedded in Mongolian text and justification applied, space is not added between the Chinese characters (as it would be in a Chinese document).n,#mixed_arrangement_cjk

Baselines, line height, etc.

The default baseline for Mongolian-script text runs down the centre of the vertical line spacing, as shown in centre_baseline.n,#h_text_decoration

When mixed with other languages, the text in those languages should also be centre-aligned along the Mongolian baseline.n,#mixed_arrangement_alphanum

Counters, lists, etc.

You can experiment with counter styles using the Counter styles converter. Patterns for using these styles in CSS can be found in Ready-made Counter Styles, and we use the names of those patterns here to refer to the various styles.

The Mongolian orthography uses ASCII and native numeric styles. It also uses fixed styles based on circled numbers.

General page layout & progression

Generally, book binding is on the left, and pages are turned towards the left, unlike books set vertically in Chinese or Japanese.n,#h_binding

Columns run horizontally, rather than vertically as in Western typography.n,#h_columns

It is common for the default orientation of pages to be landscape, rather than portrait.n,#h_paper_direction

Forms & user interaction

Form controls on Web pages should be rotated 90 degrees clockwise, compared to the form controls for Western languages.9→

The following figures show examples of what is expected. Major browsers don't fully support forms with this orientation at the time of writing.

Page numbering, running headers, etc

Page numbers should be displayed on the upper or lower side of the page.n,#h_page_numbering