Moscow Losing Another Battle in Alphabet Wars – This Time in Mongolia

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 2 – The Mongolian education ministry has ordered that from now on all official documents in that country will use the national script alongside the Cyrillic alphabet, a change that will further distance Ulan Bator from Moscow and promote closer ties between Mongolia and Mongolian-language speakers in Russia and China.
    The ministry took this step in conformity with the provisions of a 2015 alphabet reform law that had already led to the introduction of the traditional national script in the country’s schools and educational institutions (tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/22813283,  asiarussia.ru/news/44241/ and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/01/ulan-bator-makes-study-of-old-mongolian.html).
    And its move represents yet another slap in the face to Vladimir Putin who has made the maintenance of the Cyrillic alphabet in countries that were once part of the Soviet empire, as well as making it easier for Mongols, Buryats, and Uyghurs living in Mongolia, the Russian Federation and China to interact with one another.
    The classical Mongol vertical writing system was created by Chingiz Khan and was used by Mongols, Buryats and Kalmyks both in Mongolia and the USSR until 1930s. At that time, the Soviet authorities replaced that alphabet first with one based on Latin script and then with one based on Cyrillic.
    The Old Mongolia script as it came to be called remained and remains to this day the second state script in the Chinese Autonomous Region of Inner Mongolia; and Beijing’s willingness to support it may be one of the reasons why Russian commentators are not expressing outrage about this latest loss in the alphabet wars.
    But now that Mongolia has made this change, demands for a return to traditional alphabets in Buryatia, Kalmykia and Mongols living in the Russian Federation are likely to increase as some are already doing (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2015/11/buryats-increasingly-studying-ancient.html).
    And that in turn will spark more concerns in Moscow about the possible revival of pan-Mongolism among them, a trend that has increasingly agitated experts and officials in the Russian capital over the last several years (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2024/02/moscow-again-fighting-pan-mongolism.html).