蒙古诸语言

浏览

欧亚大陆中部500~700万人所使用阿尔泰诸语言的约八种语言。所有的蒙古语言关系都很密切,它们的使用者们离开了蒙古的中心地带,最早的分支偏差最大。最偏的语言是蒙古语,现有在阿富汗西部的不到两百名使用者。稍正统一些的有位於中国西北部、青海东部和临近的甘肃及内蒙古地区的几个少数民族使用的语言,总人数在50万人以下。中心语言是在蒙古共和国境内最常用的语言和周边的一些方言,是现代蒙古诸语言的标准。蒙古诸语言的中心使用人群在传统上将古典蒙古语作为他们的文学语言,通常是借自维吾尔语(参阅Turkic languages)的垂直字母写成。现代蒙古语仍采用这种书写方式,直到1946年蒙古人民共和国引用一种改进的西里尔字母为止。在1990年代的政治民主化後,旧的书写方式又再度使用。在内蒙古,这一书写方式则一直保持不变。

Mongolian languages

Family of about eight Altaic languages spoken by 5-7 million people in central Eurasia. All Mongolian languages are relatively closely related; those languages whose speakers left the core area in Mongolia the earliest tend to be the most divergent. The most remote language is Mogholi (Moghul, Mongol), now spoken by fewer than 200 people in western Afghanistan. Less divergent are the languages of several ethnic groups in northwestern China, eastern Qinghai, and adjacent parts of Gansu and Inner Mongolia, altogether spoken by under a half-million people. The core languages are Mongolian proper, the dominant dialect in the Republic of Mongolia and the basis of Modern Standard Mongolian, and a group of peripheral dialects. The core group of Mongolian-speakers traditionally have used Classical Mongolian as their literary language; it is written in a vertical alphabetic script borrowed from the Uighurs (see Turkic languages). Modern Mongolian was written in this script until 1946, when the People's Republic of Mongolia introduced a script using a modified Cyrillic alphabet. With political democratization in the 1990s, the old script has been revived. In Inner Mongolia it has been in continuous use.