Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet

Mongolian Cyrillic is the most recent of the many writing systems that have been used for Mongolian. It uses the same characters as the Russian alphabet except for the two additional characters Өө and Үү . It was introduced in the 1940s in the Mongolian People's Republic under the Russian-led strong Soviet influence on that country, after two months in 1941 where Latin was used as the official script, while Latinisation in the Soviet Union was in vogue. On 1 January 1946, the Mongolian language officially adopted the Cyrillic alphabet. The Cyrillic script had many advantages over the traditional Mongolian script known as Hudum Mongol Bichig. In the traditional Mongolian script, certain letters such as "t" and "d," "o" and "u" were frequently confused, and there were inconsistencies in letter formation at the beginning, middle, and end of words. The low legibility between letters and the need to memorize the shapes of all the syllables in the language individually increased the learning burden of traditional Mongolian script. Additionally, the structural characteristics of the traditional Mongolian script resulted in wider line spacing, occupying more space and increasing paper usage. For instance, in ancient books from the Qing Dynasty such as the Pentaglot Dictionary, the sections in Manchu and Mongolian occupy a larger portion of the page space.Moreover, vertical alignment of text was not well-suited to the needs of modern society. Therefore, following the script reform, the movement to replace the old Mongolian script continued for over 10 years. It took 21 years for Mongolia to achieve nationwide literacy, with the literacy rate increasing from around 2% to over 97%. This greatly facilitated the development of modern Mongolian culture. After the Mongolian democratic revolution in 1990, the traditional Mongolian script was briefly considered to replace Cyrillic, but the plan was canceled in the end. However, the Mongolian script has become a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schooling and is slowly gaining in popularity. The Mongolian script is a highly uncommon vertical script, and unlike other historically vertical-only scripts such as the Chinese script it cannot easily be adapted for horizontal use, which puts it at a disadvantage compared to Cyrillic for many modern purposes. Thus, the Cyrillic script continues to be used in everyday life. In March 2020, the Mongolian government announced plans to use both Cyrillic and the traditional Mongolian script in official documents by 2025. In China, the Cyrillic alphabet is also used by Chinese for learning the modern Mongolian language, as well as by some Mongols in Inner Mongolia to demonstrate their ethnic identity. ==Description==