How it began
The traditional Mongolian script, or Hudum Mongol bichig, was the first writing system created specifically for Mongolian. It is attributed to Tata-tonga, a Uyghur scribe captured by Genghis Khan around 1204, who brought the Old Uyghur alphabet to the Mongolian Plateau and adapted it. Britannica notes that the oldest surviving text dates from about 1225 and gives a date of about 1310 for the developed alphabet, after a period in which the Tibetan-derived 'Phags-pa script was also used.
How it works
It is a true alphabet with separate letters for vowels and consonants. Britannica counts 26 letters: 7 vowels, 2 diphthongs and 17 consonants. Words are written in vertical lines from top to bottom, and the lines run from left to right. Each letter has different forms depending on whether it stands at the start, in the middle or at the end of a word.
How it spread
In the fourteenth century the script was used for Mongolian translations of Buddhist works from Sanskrit and Tibetan. It became the source of other scripts, including the Clear Script used for Oirat, the Manchu alphabet and the Vagindra script used for Buryat.
Where it stands today
In the 1940s the Mongolian People's Republic replaced the vertical script with a Cyrillic alphabet based on Russian. The traditional script stayed in continuous use among Mongolian speakers in Inner Mongolia, in China. The script has been taught again in Mongolian schools since the 1990s. In March 2020 the government announced plans to use both Cyrillic and the traditional script in official documents by 2025. It was added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999.
