Language ecology and policy in Mongolia: perspective of China

Abstract Mongolia and China are neighboring countries to each other, and they also have many influences, overlappings, commonalities or connections with each other in terms of geography, history, politics, economy, culture, ethnicity, language and so on. Thus, it is necessary to examine the language ecology and policy in Mongolia from the perspective of China. This paper aims to give an account of Mongolia’s language ecology encompassing such contents as geological, historical, political, economical, cultural, ethnic and linguistic factors. And then it is to delineate Mongolia’s language policies (LPs) involving status, corpus and acquisition plannings. Finally, the paper makes an in-depth analysis of Mongolia’s language ecology and LPs, trying to find out their features. The research result shows the social linguistic repertoire in Mongolia is composed mainly of dominant Khalkha Mongolian and a few minority languages, such as Kazakh and Tuvan, so LPs in this linguistically homogenous country have focused merely on Khalkha Mongolian. However, its LPs, especially in terms of the choices of Mongol script and the first foreign language, have been much influenced by the former Soviet Union, Russia and Western countries, respectively.