ABSTRACT
In Mongolia, new alphabets have been introduced to meet the challenges of significant historical changes. In other words, these script changes are political. After Mongolia became the second communist country in the world in 1921, these same ideological and political struggles impacted the ways in which scripts were introduced and modified. For approximately ten years, beginning in 1931, Mongolian government officials adapted a Latin script and prepared for its widespread implementation. Yet, by the end of the 1930s, as other countries in the Soviet world began shifting their script policies, the Mongolian government introduced a completely different variation of the Latin script. Even more dramatically, within a few more years, the Mongolian government declared Cyrillic, not Latin, the national script for Mongolia. These official, top-down, and government-based decisions about alphabets were occurring in the context of Mongolians who used the traditional script, Classical Mongolian Script, as part of their national and ethnic identity. Importantly, however, many literate Mongolians who were lamas in Mongolian Buddhism used the Tibetan script to express themselves in Mongolia. Enabling readers to look back at the importance of script reforms after the 1921 People’s Revolution, this chapter will analyze the two variations of the Mongolian Latin alphabet, the Soviet impact on script policies, and the process by which Tibetan characters were adapted for Mongolian. These discussions will contribute to the ways in which readers connect language and language policy to socialist-era and post-socialist identities.
