Mongolian Cyrillic transcription policy

Throughout this website, Mongolian names and terms have been transliterated according to the official standard for the "Romanization of Mongolian Cyrillic characters" (MNS 5217:2002) approved by the Mongolian Centre for Standards and Measures.

In addition, the following principles have been followed:

1. In the case of names and terms with common English-language translations – such as "Mongolia" (Mongol uls ) or the Secret History of the Mongols (Mongolyn nuuc tovchoo ) – the conventional translations have been used, with transliterations of the original Mongolian given in brackets on first occurrence.

2. For Mongolian names which exist in a number of established forms, a transliteration of the modern Cyrillic has been preferred, with alternate transcriptions given in brackets on the first occurrence in the text as well as in the index. Thus the spelling Chingis Xaan has been used as opposed to the more common Genghis Khan or Chinggis Khaan. Historical names of people and places which are commonly transliterated from Chinese or other sources, but that do not have contemporary English equivalents, have been given in their Mongolian versions; thus Xünnü has been used as opposed to Xiongnu or Hsiung-nu , but Lake Baikal is given as such and not in the Mongolian form Baigal' nuur .

3. Texts from the oral tradition, historic names and terms, and the names of Mongolian literary works written or published in non-Cyrillic scripts are, for the sake of simplicity, transliterated based on their modern Cyrillic spellings only, with English translations given in brackets. It has been assumed that the modern Cyrillic transcription will provide the lay reader a better indication of the actual modern pronunciation of such names and terms, while giving sufficient access to contemporary Mongolian bibliographies and critical works concerning them.

4. Due to the limitations of URL encoding, diacritics and apostrophes have been omitted in links and page titles throughout this website.

Pronunciation

Most of the Latin characters are pronounced in a manner similar to their corresponding English phonemes, with the exception of Zh (pronounced "j"), X (guttural "h" or "kh"), and C (pronounced "ts"). The feminine vowels Ö and Ü are pronounced "oo", as in "good" and "tool" respectively. Doubled vowels indicate a lengthening of the vowel sound and syllabic stress, but do not change the phonetic value.

Table of Transcriptions

Official national standard for the romanization of the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (MNS 5217:2002)