Mongolian Alphabet

The Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (кирилл цагаан толгой) has 35 letters: the 33 letters of Russian plus Ө ө and Ү ү. It has been the official script of Mongolia since the 1940s, and it is what you read on a street sign in Улаанбаатар, on a bag of ааруул at the market, and in the programme handed out at Наадам.

If you already read Cyrillic, the alphabet costs you one evening. The pronunciation costs rather more. About a dozen familiar-looking letters carry unfamiliar sounds: в is a w, з is an affricate, л hisses, and a doubled vowel is a different word rather than a typo.

The 35 letters

Seven vowels, two of them new

Mongolian works with seven vowel qualities: а, э, и, о, ө, у, ү.

Ө ө is [ɵ]: round your lips as if for о, but leave the tongue where it sits for э. German schön and French deux land almost on it. Listen for it in өдөр (day), өвөл (winter) and өвөлжөө, a herder's winter camp.

Ү ү is [u], an ordinary clean u. The letter looks exotic, so learners reach for something exotic; the odd vowel is actually у, which is pronounced deep in the throat with the tongue root pulled back, [ʊ]. The pair уул (mountain) and үүл (cloud) differs by that depth, not by length.

A doubled letter is a long vowel

Length carries meaning: цас is snow and цаас is paper, ул is a sole and уул a mountain. Hold a doubled vowel roughly twice as long as a single one. Two very common words go the other way: би (I) and та (you, polite) are written short and said long, [piː] and [taː].

The vowels that almost vanish

Outside the first syllable a single vowel letter is barely pronounced. It shrinks to a neutral murmur, and the letter you see (а, э, о, ө) mostly tells you which harmony class the word belongs to. Монгол comes out as [mɔŋɢəɮ], хавар (spring) as [xawər], өдөр as [ɵdər]. The weight of the word sits on syllable one; everything after it leans on that syllable.

Vowel harmony chooses the ending

The vowels split into two classes that never share a word: back а, о, у against front э, ө, ү, with и neutral. Every suffix therefore exists in matching shapes, and the stem picks its own:

• ном (book) becomes номууд, but гэр becomes гэрүүд;
• тал (steppe) gives талаас (from the steppe), гэр gives гэрээс, and Монгол gives Монголоос, because a rounded о pulls the suffix into оо;
• the genitive is номын but гэрийн.

So the thing to memorise is never one ending but a set of endings, and the first thing to look at in a new word is its vowels.

Consonants that mislead

• в = [w]. аав (dad) and хавар (spring) both use the English w.
• з is the affricate [dz]; the sound [z] does not exist in Mongolian. зуд, the winter disaster that wipes out herds, starts like the ds of lads.
• ж = [dʒ]: жил, a year of the twelve-year animal cycle.
• л = [ɮ], a lateral fricative. Set the tongue for l and force the air noisily out along both sides; at the end of a word it goes voiceless and comes close to Welsh ll. Practise on лам, Улаанбаатар and аргал (dried dung, the fuel of the steppe).
• б/п, д/т, г/х, з/ц, ж/ч are told apart by aspiration, not by voicing: б is an unaspirated [p], п is [pʰ] with a puff of air.
• н at the end of a word is [ŋ]: морин is [mɔrʲiŋ].
• к, п, ф, щ live almost entirely in loanwords.

ь, ъ and ы do different jobs here

ь palatalises the consonant before it, so морь (horse) ends in a soft [rʲ]. ъ does the opposite and inserts a y-glide, as in авъяас (talent). ы hardly appears inside roots at all; it lives in the endings -ын and -ыг, as in Монголын түүх, the history of Mongolia.

The other Mongolian script

Cyrillic is not the only script Mongolian is written in. The vertical монгол бичиг, written in columns running left to right, was the standard until the 1940s and is still the everyday script of Mongolians in Inner Mongolia. The 2015 Law on the Mongolian Language keeps Cyrillic as the script of state business (art. 7.1) and, from 1 January 2025, requires state bodies to keep official records in Cyrillic and the national script together (arts. 7.2 and 24.2). In practice learners start with Cyrillic; монгол бичиг is a second literacy, taught at school and used on certificates, monuments and logos.