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FEATURES thelinguist.uberflip.com APRIL/MAY The Linguist 19 The combination of the easy Cyrillic alphabet and the adoption of Russian educational methods for all gradually lifted Mongolian literacy to levels rarely achieved elsewhere. Moreover, Russian was taught as a foreign language in schools throughout the country. For the first time, all Mongolians had direct linguistic access to an entirely different cultural world. To this day, the influence of Russian language models remains clear in much official writing and speech, as well as in the psychology of some political and academic elites. In general, apart from communist political terms, Russian words that entered Mongolian directly tended to fill linguistic gaps, for instance chemodan ('briefcase') and avtobus ('bus'). But some Russian loan-words were chiefly used for fashionable effect – a phenomenon some local scholars tried to curb by promoting the use of existing Mongolian vocabulary, e.g. duureg ('district') and hem ('degree of temperature') instead of the Russian raion and gradus. More creative formations were nisdeg tereg (lit. 'flying cart') for 'helicopter' and tsahilgaan tovch (lit. 'lightning button') for 'zip'. While the use of classical script in everyday life was sustained in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China, in Mongolia it fell into virtual disuse. This said, efforts to preserve knowledge of the script continue. It is still taught at secondary schools and there have been various attempts to have it re-adopted as the official script. Recently it has made a resurgence in certain formal documents, as well as on the name plates of some official organisations and companies, alongside Cyrillic text and sometimes even Roman script. However, to write classical Mongolian correctly one needs to learn mediaeval spelling and grammar, which is as different from modern Mongolian as Middle English is from the English spoken today. This remains a strong practical constraint on its widespread use within Mongolia. New world, new language The latest wave of Mongolia's linguistic revolution came after the break-up of the Soviet sphere of influence around 1990. Globalisation and the rapid spread of electronic media resulted in significant changes. Mongolians now had free access to international media, much of it in English. Foreign business engagement, notably in the mineral resources sector, led to dramatic economic growth. This undermined the importance of the pastoral economy, whose vocabulary had, for hundreds of years, been the backbone of communication in Mongolian. Demand for semi-skilled labour, especially in expanding construction work, led to a surge of migrant workers from rural areas to cities, particularly to the capital. Many of these migrant workers had already interrupted their education in the first years of the free market economy, when herders sought to increase their wealth by expanding their herds. That led to pressure on young people (especially boys) to leave school and help their parents look after the extra livestock. Increased stock levels produced overgrazing, and mass animal casualties followed a series of environmental disasters, including harsh winters and droughts. This forced more people off the land. Now mainly based in towns, many migrants still lack proper education. Thus, increased illiteracy and semi-literacy were a perverse consequence of a poorly-distributed increase in GDP. This issue has yet to be fully addressed. In the context of globalisation, English has gradually taken over from Russian as the main foreign language taught in the Mongolian educational system. Interestingly, increasing exposure to English through electronic media has affected the quality of some people's Mongolian language skills – a phenomenon which also occurred in social groups that had extensive exposure to Russian language under the communist regime. Likewise, the language of fashionable popular media is increasingly rich in loan-words, even when there are already Mongolian words with the same meaning, for instance shou ('show') instead of udeshleg or tsenguun. Many loan-words are of English origin, transliterated semi-phonetically into Cyrillic. Some of these may enter Mongolian via Russian, for instance biznesmen ('businessman') and menezhment ('management'), and have been recognised as standard spellings. Others may be adopted directly from English, such as messezh Mongolian WAYS OF LIFE The slow-paced nomadic life on the plains is disappearing, as the horse – a national symbol – is replaced by vehicles (main image). Such social change has an inevitable impact on Mongolian culture and language ALTAIHUNTERS VIA WIKIPEDIA (CC BY-SA 3.0); AL JAZEERA ENGLISH VIA FLICKR (CC BY-SA 2.0)