Mongolic | |
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Geographic distribution: | Mongolia; Inner Mongolia and regions close to its border, Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai (China); Buryatia and Kalmykia (Russian Federation) |
Linguistic classification: | Altaic (controversial)
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Subdivisions: |
Central Mongolic
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ISO 639-5: | xgn |
Geographic distribution of the Mongolic languages |
The Mongolic languages are a group of languages that are spoken in Central Asia. Some linguists propose to put Mongolic languages in the same group as the Turkic and Tungusic languages. They call this group the Altaic languages, but not all linguists agreed upon this.
The best-known member of this language family is Mongolian. In Cyrillic orthography as it is used in Mongolia it is written Монгол Хэл. In the vertical Uygur-derived script as used in Inner Mongolia in China it is written Mongγol Kele. It is the primary language of most of the residents of Mongolia, and is spoken by around 5.7 million people in Mongolia, Russia, and China.