ABSTRACT
The conventional understanding of the Mongolic language family is based on the information available from the living and historically documented Mongolic languages, all of which may be considered descendants of Proto-Mongolic. The only pieces of direct evidence of any other kind of Mongolic are supplied by the few traits in Written Mongol that seem to reflect traces of Late Pre-Proto-Mongolic dialectal variation. On the basis of this evidence, it may be concluded that in Pre-Chinggisid times there existed dialectal forms of Mongolic which in some relatively minor respects deviated from the dialect that came to form the foundation of Proto-Mongolic. It may further be assumed that such dialectal differences were conditioned by social, cultural, and geographical divisions among the direct ancestors of the historical Mongols.
