In Mongolia By the beginning of the 20th century, the peoples of the
Mongolian language group used predominantly the
Mongolian vertical script and its variations. In the 1920s, the
USSR began the
process of converting the scripts of various peoples of the country to the Latin alphabet. By the end of the 1920s, two peoples living in the USSR who spoke Mongolian languages, the
Kalmyks and the
Buryats, had switched to the Latin alphabet. The Mongolian People's Republic, whose official language was Mongolian, was at that time heavily dependent on the USSR in political and cultural terms, which led to the beginning of Latinization there as well. In early 1929, the Soviet linguist
Nicholas Poppe published a project for a Latin alphabet that would be common to the
Buryat and Mongolian languages. He proposed using the following letters:
A a, B b, C c, Ç ç, D d, E e, F f, G g, I i, J j, K k, L l, M m, N n, ꞑ, O o, Ɵ ɵ, P p, R r, S s, T t, U u, Y y, X x, V v. A distinctive feature of the project was the use of the letter
i not only to denote a vowel sound, but also as a modifier letter. Thus,
c was to denote the sound [ч],
ci — [ц],
ç — [дз],
çi — [дж],
s — [с],
si — [ш]. The letters
p, f, v, k were proposed to write foreign borrowings. Long vowels were indicated by doubling the corresponding letter. In June 1929, another version of the alphabet, developed by Khabaev and Baradin, was approved for the Buryat language. This forced Poppe to revise his project and publish another version in early 1930, primarily aimed at the Mongolian language. In this version, the author proposed the following system for indicating sibilant and hissing sounds:
c — [ч],
ç — [ц],
z — [дз],
ƶ — [дж],
s — [с],
ş — [ш]. Poppe's revised project eventually included the following letters:
A a, B b, C c, Ç ç, D d, E e, F f, G g, I i, K k, L l, M m, N n, O o, Ɵ ɵ, P p, R r, S s, Ș ş, T t, U u, Y y, Z z, Ƶ ƶ, X x, V v. In the first half of 1930, the VIII Congress of the
Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party proposed switching from the Old Mongolian script to the Latin alphabet. This proposal was supported by the
Great People’s Khural and the government, which was confirmed by Decree No. 36 of October 31, 1930. The new alphabet, consisting of 30 letters, was first published in the
newspaper Ynen on February 19, 1930. This alphabet was more of a transliteration of the Old Mongolian script than a fundamentally new approach to orthography. Since 1931, it was this version of the alphabet that began to appear on the pages of the Mongolian press. Individual articles in newspapers were printed in it, and the titles and imprints of individual books were duplicated. However, most of the literature and press were still printed in the Old Mongolian script. At the same time, already in 1933, the MPR began to abandon Latinization, and even the rudimentary use of the Latin alphabet ceased. Moreover, during the political repressions in 1937, the former Minister of Education was accused of attempting to “destroy the national Mongolian script”. The length of vowels was indicated by an apostrophe after the letter. However, a month later, on March 25, 1941, the Latin alphabet was abolished in the Mongolian People's Republic and replaced by the
Cyrillic alphabet, which is still used, with some changes, to this day. This system forms the basis of the
SASM/GNC romanization of Mongolian that has been used in China to transcribe personal names and toponyms since 1978. The alphabet of the 1970s project looked like this:
a, b, c, č, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, ng, o, ɵ, p, r, s, š, t, u, ʉ, w, y, z, ž. Despite being neither widely promoted nor having any official status, Mongolians were increasingly using Latin script on smartphones and social networking services . == Characters ==