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MongoliaEthnic and Linguistic Groups
Mongols and Kazakhs
Mongolia's population is ethnically quite homogenous; about
90 percent of the populace speaks one of several dialects of the
Mongol language. Mongol is an Altaic language, related to the
Turkic languages, such as Uzbek, Turkish, and
Kazakh (see Glossary),
and more distantly to Korean and perhaps, in the
opinion of some linguists, to Japanese. Except for the dialect of
the Buryat Mongols, who predominantly inhabit the area around
Lake Baykal in Siberia, and the dialects of scattered isoglosses
in Mongolia, all dialects of Mongol spoken in Mongolia are
readily understood by native speakers of the language. The
Khalkha (see Glossary)
Mongols are the largest element of the
population. According to the 1979 census, they made up 77.5
percent of the population (see
table 3, Appendix). The term
khalkha, which means "shield," has been used at least
since the mid-sixteenth century to refer to the nomads of the
traditional Mongol heartland of high steppes and mountains. They
have been the most thoroughly pastoral of all the Mongol tribes
or subethnic groups, the nomads' nomads, and the least affected
by foreign influences. In the twentieth century, they occupied
most of the central and the eastern areas of the country. Khalkha
Mongol is the standard language; it is taught in the schools and
is used for all official business. The written language is based
on the Khalkha of the Ulaanbaatar region, and when Mongol script
was replaced by a Cyrillic alphabet between 1941 and 1946, the
Russian Cyrillic was modified to suit the phonetic structure of
Khalkha.
Another 12 percent of the population in 1979 spoke a variety
of western or northern Mongol dialects, such as Dorbet, Dzakchin,
Buryat, or the southeastern Dariganga. Speakers of these dialects
were concentrated in their ancestral territories in far western
or northwestern Mongolia in Hovd, Uvs, and Hovsgol aymags,
or along the Chinese frontier in the southeast. Ethnic
distinctions among the various Mongol subgroups have been
relatively minor; they have been expressed in oral traditions of
historical conflicts among the groups, in such ethnic markers as
women's headdresses or the shapes of boots, and in such minor
variations in pastoral technique as placement of camels' nose
pegs
(see Mongolia in Transition, 1368-1911
, ch. 1). Apart from
immediate adaptation to different environments, Mongol culture
has been relatively uniform over large areas, and dialect or
tribal differences have not become significant political or
social issues.
Mongolia's largest minority, accounting for 5.3 percent of
the population in 1979, is the Kazakh people of the Altai. The
Kazakhs, who also live in the Soviet Union's Kazakh Soviet
Socialist Republic and in China's Xinjiang-Uygur Autonomous
Region, are a pastoral, Turkic-speaking, and traditionally Muslim
people who live in Bayan-Olgiy Aymag in extreme western Mongolia.
Bayan-Olgiy is a largely Kazakh administrative unit, where the
Kazakh language is used in the primary schools and in local
administrative offices. There is a fairly high level of contact
with the Soviet Union's Kazakh Republic, which provides textbooks
for the schools. Kazakhs of the Altai traditionally have hunted
from horseback with trained golden eagles on their wrists and
greyhounds slung across the saddle--both to be launched at game--
and pictures of eagle-bearing Kazakhs are common in Mongolian
tourist literature. Mongol is taught as the second language and
Russian as the third in Kazakh schools, and bilingual Kazakhs
appear to participate in the Mongolian professional and
bureaucratic elite on an equal footing with Mongols. Kazakhs also
make up a disproportionate number of the relatively highly paid
workers in the coal mines of north-central Mongolia; this
situation may indicate either limited opportunities in the narrow
valleys of Bayan-Olgiy Aymag or government efforts to favor a
potentially restive minority, or both.
Data as of June 1989
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