SITG Dispatch from Mongolia

Hello! My name is Shixin Zhao (Carol), and I am a third year in the College double majoring in Global Studies and Linguistics. This summer, thanks to the amazingly generous help provided by FLAG, I got to stay in Mongolia for two months to study Mongolian.

I was born in Hohhot city, the capital of Inner Mongolia. It is an autonomous region on the border between China and Mongolia, where twice as many Mongolians reside as in Mongolia the country. They are, meanwhile, overwhelmingly outnumbered by the Hans whose immigration history can be traced back two centuries or even longer. Just as any minority language in today’s nation states, the Mongolian-speaking population is decreasing under Chinese’s influence, primarily Mandarin.

I am born to both Han parents, so I grew up monolingually with Chinese languages. It is indeed not personally necessary or socially useful to learn Mongolian, but as a language is inseparable from its culture and presents an irreplaceable way of understanding it, I know not speaking Mongolian is keeping me from fully appreciating the diversity of my hometown.

Although adult second-language acquisition is surely not the same as, perhaps will never be, learning from family members since early childhood, the intense two months of learning Mongolian in Mongolia has enabled me to somewhat form thoughts in Mongolian language before any other one, and of course, connect to people in both the urban and rural area of the country and their pains, joys, struggles and hopes. I went to international food festivals, Japanese cultural expos and even bachata gatherings in the capital Ulaanbaatar; I traveled on horse and visited the Tsaatan people, or reindeer herders, who live without electricity in the forests in the far-north Russian-Mongolian border; I hitchhiked into the wilderness and spent the night at a nomad’s ger, or yurt, on the mountain top under millions of stars and around nothing but his sheep and goats. Although many of these people could effortlessly speak English or Mandarin, the Mongolian language skill I quickly acquired in two months is still the major reason why I could hitchhike across the countryside in the northern provinces and accomplish one of the most difficult travels in my life.

And yes, there is so much intimacy between the Mongolian language and this land: there is a confusing number of names for different types of curd and cheese, hundreds of ways of calling “horse” based on their color, gender and age, and accurate, specific terms for everything involved in the nomadic life in grasslands, deserts and the mountains which consist the landscape of my home region. As my Mongolian teacher says: “Mongolian is forty percent about the city, and sixty percent about the countryside.”

Someone I met in Ulaanbaatar told me with an indifferent expression on his face that Mongolian language was rich in the past, but cannot catch up with modernity. Such opinion is not hard to find in the capital, where many young Mongolians grow up watching YouTube and can speak fluent English. Meanwhile, there is also the strong nationalist sentiment among the older generation, who are known to blame the younger generation for using foreign languages too much. Who is correct, as an outsider I have no right to judge, but I do know that these descriptions, be it “insufficient and outdated” or “the most beautiful in the world,” are imaginations of the speakers whose conclusions are based off their own political beliefs and social values. This polarization of language ideology is certainly a challenge faced by many communities across the world, for language matters on a personal level as much as public, as it ties into the perception of a common ethnic or national identity.

I am more than grateful to have this opportunity to not only learn the Mongolian language in Mongolia during this summer, but also come into contact with living examples of what I study in sociolinguistics: the power-relations and the ideologies behind languages.