Mongolian

The Khalkha dialect is a dialect of central Mongolian widely spoken in Mongolia. According to some classifications, the Khalkha dialect includes Inner Mongolian varieties such as Shiliin gol, Ulaanchab and Sönid. As it was the basis for the Cyrillic orthography of Mongolian, it is de facto the national language of Mongolia. The name of the dialect is related to the name of the Khalkha Mongols and the Khalkha River.

There are certain differences between normative (standardised form of Khalkha) and spoken Khalkha. For example, the normative language uses proximal demonstratives based on the word stem ʉː/n- (except for the nominative in [i̠n] and the accusative which takes the stem ʉːn-) and thus exhibits the same developmental tendency as exhibited by Oirat. On the other hand, the spoken language also makes use of paradigms that are based on the stems inʉːn- and inĕn-. This seems to agree with the use in Chakhar Mongolian. The same holds for the distal demonstrative /tir/.

Khalkha may roughly be divided into Northern and Southern Khalkha, which would include Sönid, etc. Both varieties share affricate depalatalization, namely, /tʃ/ > /ts/ and /tʃʰ/ > /tsʰ/ except before *i, while Southern Khalkha patterns with Chakhar and Ordos Mongolian in that it exhibits a dissimilating deaspiration; e.g. *tʰatʰa > /tatʰ/. However, Mongolian scholars more often hold that the border between Khalkha and Chakhar is the border between the Mongolian state and the Chakhar area of Inner Mongolia of China.

From Wikipedia · Khalkha Mongolian · CC BY-SA 4.0