Mongolian Language History And Facts
Posted on January 28, 2015 by Chris
The Mongolian language is spoken by the people of Mongolia and some of its surrounding areas. Mongolia used to be referred to as a Central Asian country but today it is given a geographical location of East Central Asia.
There was a time when the Mongolian empire had exerted its control on much of Central Asia and South Asia and it had also influence in extreme West Asia and extreme East Asia but that was a long time back. Today, Mongolian is spoken by about five million people. The count makes it one of the least spoken languages of the world. The influence of Mongolian in the region has also diminished with the Chinese languages becoming more significant.
The Mongolian language is one of the oldest languages in the world. Scientifically, there is very little evidence to suggest that Mongolian is an ancient language because there are no scriptures or writings which dates the language back two thousand years or even closer.
Mongolian has been used as a language in written form for about eight hundred years now. Before that or till the 13th century, Mongolian was largely just a spoken language. Thus, there is no evidence to indicate that the language is as old as Sanskrit, Latin or some other language. However, the Mongolian race has been around for more than two millennia and that is beyond dispute. That certainly provides enough reason to believe that Mongolian had been spoken and has been around since before the birth of Christ.
Mongolian is one of the more complicated languages of the world. It is an agglutinative language. The subject-object-predicate order of wording, sentence formation and the complex syllables make it a difficult language. The norm of adding suffixes or affixes to develop a word and to have a new meaning is also difficult for people who speak English, Spanish or Hindi. Mongolian is often thought to be a part of the Chinese languages but it is not. There is absolutely no correlation between Mongolian and Chinese languages. The two even hail from different families of languages.
Here are a few interesting facts about the Mongolian language.
- Mongolian has similar grammar and sentence structures as Japanese and Korean. But there is absolutely no correlation among these three languages.
- Mongolian language has more than two million words and it has more vowels than other popular languages of the world.
- More than eight different systems exist to write Mongolian.