A report on Inner Mongolia and Chakhar Mongolian

The number of speakers across all its dialects may be 5.2 million, including the vast majority of the residents of Mongolia and many of the ethnic Mongol residents of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China.

In the discussion of grammar to follow, the variety of Mongolian treated is Standard Khalkha Mongolian (i.e. the standard written language as formalized in the writing conventions and in grammar as taught in schools), but much of what is to be said is also valid for vernacular (spoken) Khalkha and for other Mongolian dialects, especially Chakhar.

It is assumed by most Inner Mongolia linguists and would be on the same level as the other three major dialect groups Khalkha, Buryat, Oirat.

Southern Mongolian would consist of the dialects Chakhar, Ordos, Baarin, Khorchin, Kharchin and (possibly) Alasha that originated from Oirat.

Alphabets based on this classical vertical script are used in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia to this day to write Mongolian, Xibe and, experimentally, Evenki.

The main features of the period are that the vowels ï and i had lost their phonemic significance, creating the i phoneme (in the Chakhar dialect, the Standard Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, these vowels are still distinct); inter-vocal consonants γ/g, b/w had disappeared and the preliminary process of the formation of Mongolian long vowels had begun; the initial h was preserved in many words; grammatical categories were partially absent, etc. The development over this period explains why the Mongolian script looks like a vertical Arabic script (in particular the presence of the dot system).

This seems to agree with the use in Chakhar Mongolian.

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 South Mongolia.