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A HISTORY OF INNER ASIA

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Introduction 31<br />

In linguistic terms, Turkic and Mongolian are agglutinative languages,<br />

structurally related and classified as the principal components of<br />

the Altaic group.Some scholars even suspect a distant kinship with<br />

Korean and Japanese.<br />

(b) Mongolian<br />

Linguists speak of three groups of Mongolian languages: eastern, northern,<br />

and western.They may be genetically related to Turkic languages;<br />

this kinship, however, is so remote that mutual intelligibility is out of the<br />

question.<br />

Eastern Mongolian is the official language of the Republic of<br />

Mongolia, and like the Turkic languages and Tajik, it is written in the<br />

Cyrillic alphabet.A combination of political and demographic factors<br />

has caused the aforementioned internal split within the area populated<br />

by the speakers of eastern Mongolian: for besides the two and a half<br />

million inhabitants of the Republic, over four million live to the south of<br />

the border, in the Mongol Autonomous Region of the People’s Republic<br />

of China.Here too, political separation has caused a cultural one, the<br />

usage of different scripts being the most visible example.In the Region,<br />

Mongolian is written not in the Cyrillic alphabet but in the Mongols’<br />

own traditional script, while at the same time all educated citizens are<br />

also literate in Chinese, in contrast to the Mongolian Republic, where<br />

this is true of Russian.<br />

Northern Mongolian is also known as Buriat, and is, together with<br />

Russian, the official language of the Buriat Autonomous Republic of the<br />

Russian Federation.Western Mongolian is also known as Kalmyk or<br />

Kalmuck, and is, again together with Russian, the official language of<br />

the Kalmyk Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation.This<br />

republic is situated to the west of the Volga along the river’s lowermost<br />

course, with a short stretch of the Caspian coast as its southeastern limit,<br />

while its capital, Elista, is farther inland.<br />

(c) Tajik<br />

Tajik is virtually the same as Persian, the official language of Iran; the<br />

differences are so minor that if Tajikistan and Iran were united politically,<br />

a question of two languages would not arise.As in the case of the<br />

Turkic languages, an additional artificial barrier has been different<br />

alphabets – Tajik being written in the Cyrillic, Persian in the Arabic<br />

script; removal of this barrier by a return to the Arabic alphabet would<br />

not only make their sameness obvious, but would also create a belt of

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