The Khalkhas
About 90% of the citizens of Mongolia are Mongolians from different tribes. Among them, the most important is the Khalkha tribe, which represents about 80% of the population.
Appearing in Mongolia in the 15th century, during the reign of Dayan Khan, the Khalkhas are Eastern Mongols. Their name would come from the Khalkha river which flows in the east of the country. Gathered under the aegis of Chinggis Khan, they are governed by the descendants of the latter, the Genghishanids, until the 20th century.
They speak the official language of the country, the Mongolian Khalkha, which has more than 6 million speakers worldwide. Of the Altaic language family, which includes Mongolian, Turkic and Tungus languages, Khalkha is used in administration and education. Some ethnic groups descended from the Oirats, the Western Mongols, speak different Mongolian dialects which are variants of Oirat. Nevertheless, these dialects are close enough to be understood by all and do not challenge a deep common identity. The Western Mongols share a somewhat conflicting history with the Eastern Mongols, but they have sometimes been united under the same leader.
The other ethnic groups of the country
The rest of the population is made up of other ethnic groups, mostly of Mongolian or Turkish origin and representing about 20% of the inhabitants of Mongolia. They are distributed throughout the country. In the east, we find the Dariganga. The Buryats live mainly in the north while the Kazakhs and the Oirats live in the extreme west of Mongolia.
Kazakhs. If they represent only 6% of the population, they populate 90% of the province of Bayan-Ölgii, in the Altai region. This aimag has
a special status: it is a semi-autonomous Kazakh province since 1939. Kazakh, a language of Turkish origin, is spoken there, while Mongolian is only taught as a second language. Coming from Kazakhstan - which is only about 40 km away - the Kazakhs are the main non-Mongolian group established in Mongolia. They are mostly Muslim and practice Sunni Islam. There are several mosques in the western provinces. Among their most spectacular traditions is the hunting of the golden eagle, practiced mostly in winter and celebrated every year during the golden eagle festival. Other Turkic ethnic groups also inhabit the western provinces, such as the Tuva, present in Khovd aimag, and the Khoton, who speak a dialect of Uyrat, in Uvs.The Oirats.
The descendants of the Western Mongols form a complex ethnic mosaic in the west of the country. Among them, there are different tribes, such as Durvud, Bayad, Zaakhtchin, Oolds, Myangad and Torguud.Buryats.
About 40,000 Buryats live in northern Mongolia, mainly in the provinces of Khövsgöl, Bulgan and Selenge. A majority is also settled on the other side of the Russian border, east of Lake Baikal, around the city of Ulan-Ude. Formerly nomads, they are now semi-sedentary or even completely sedentary. They speak Buryat, a Mongolian language divided into many dialects, and practice shamanism.The Dariganga.
A sub-group of the Khalkhas, they represent only 1.4% of the population and live in the east, in the province of Sükhbaatar, one of whose districts bears their name.The Tsaatan. These reindeer herders are located in the region of Lake Khövsgöl, northern Mongolia. During the Soviet period, they underwent a forced sedentarization, but a part of them resumed their old nomadic way of life since the 1990s. Today, there are about 80 families, half of which live in the taiga.
Languages and alphabets
Paradoxically, there are more Mongolians living outside the national borders. There are 5.8 million of them in China, mainly in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia. About one million are settled in Russia, between the provinces of Buryatia - where they represent 25% of the population - and Kalmykia. Russian is the second language spoken in Mongolia, and the Mongolians themselves have been using the Cyrillic alphabet since 1946 to transcribe their language. Imposed by the Soviets, Cyrillic has kept its status of official alphabet but the traditional alphabet is used again since the 1990s and the collapse of the USSR.
Traditional alphabet. When Chinggis Khan unified the Mongols in the 13th century, he imposed a common language and a writing system, the Mongolian bitchig or tsagaan tolgoi
. Derived from the Uyghur alphabet, it is one of the only alphabets in the world to be written vertically and from left to right. The letters change shape according to their position in the word, which makes this script complex. At the beginning of the 1990s, only a minority of people were still able to decipher it. Since 1995, a law requires its teaching in elementary school.Cyrillic alphabet. Officially in use since 1941, the Cyrillic alphabet has supplanted the use of the traditional script in Mongolia. If reforms of the writing system had been considered at the beginning of the twentieth century in the country, including the introduction of the Latin alphabet, it is finally the Cyrillic that was imposed by the Soviets. It is still mostly used today, although the traditional script is being revitalized.
Safeguarding the language and traditional writing
In September 2020, the Chinese government announced a new policy in Inner Mongolia. Mongolian, which was used in some schools in this autonomous region of China, will now be replaced by Mandarin in these schools. To protest against this policy, which is considered aggressive, solidarity movements have sprung up around the world, and the hashtag #SaveTheMongolianLanguage has spread on social networks. The disappearance of the Mongolian language and alphabet in this region would represent the loss of 60% of Mongolian speakers in the world. The inhabitants of Inner Mongolia have always kept the use of Mongolian Bitchig while the use of this script has become rare in Outer Mongolia since the introduction of Cyrillic. In 2013, Unesco also included the calligraphy of this script on the list of intangible cultural heritage requiring urgent safeguarding.
To preserve Mongolian Bitchig, the Mongolian government has declared that it will be promulgated as the country's official alphabet from 2025. The traditional script will be used in government documents alongside the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to reintroduce its use more widely. The government is also seeking to digitize this script so that it can be used online.
