What Genghis Khan's Mongolian Sounded Like - and how we know

Genghis Khan was an unusual conqueror. Yes, he subdued vast lands from atop a horse, but he didn't brag loudly across the ages. He kept secrets. A secret history. A secret burial. No images from his life. Conquered peoples weren't even allowed to learn his language. With all this secrecy, could we ever know what his language sounded like? My first encounter with Mongolian. Imagine me working at a coffee shop. For years I spent my morning steaming customized espresso elixirs for customers to carry out with style. But after my shift, I'd relax by heading three blocks to the library and picking grammars off the stacks. On this day, I noticed a new book. I opened it and met a language that built words mechanically, that had vowel harmony, long vowels, and an L it warned me would be tricky to pronounce. Fun! Until one example broke my flow. Something, something, something. Genghis Khan. Suddenly this wasn't just grammar. It felt like history. Mongolian. The Mongols. Was this the remnant voice of the great Khan himself? I didn't realize it at the time, but this curiosity would lead me down an epic road. Books, maps, epigraphy late into the night, following nomadic hoofprints to chase a language. And if you want in on that journey, we travel to Mongolia today. Fly into Lombard, the red hero city, and you'll see one name at the airport, on bottles, a hotel, a bank, and the character atop the world's largest man-on-horse statue southeast of town. Not Genghis Khan, but Chinggis Khan. Yes, in Cyrillic. No, this isn't Russian, it's Mongolian, just like in that grammar. Endings with vowel harmony, postpositions, not prepositions, long vowels like khan, and L's and L's of lz. Cross the border into China, and you're in inner Mongolia. As you look around at shops and signs, it can be hard to imagine that a roving shrine to Genghis Khan once toured this region for the devout after his death. But focus above the Chinese, and you'll spot some Mongolian. In an older alphabet, with toothy consonant-vowel letters connected along a cursive spine. It's unique in the way it's written from top to bottom, and arose from left to right. For beginners, it's a challenging script. I mean, this thing kind of breaks webpages. But to ease the pain, children here learn it as syllables. When they recite words with these syllables, something strange happens. Extra unspoken syllables emerge. The word khil-khe-le-kho-kho-to, the blue city of inner Mongolia, is kho-khe-kho-ta. And the four syllables of u-jan-ba-tar are written with six. Where do these extra syllables come from? From back in time. 1204, before he is Khan, the up-and-coming Timuujin conquers a tribe to the south, the Nema. Among his new subjects is a scholar, Tatatunga, who writes in the Uyghur script, which his people inherited, ultimately, from Aramaic. There's a whole backstory, but if it reminds you of rotated Arabic, there is a reason. Timuujin may be illiterate, but he immediately recognizes the use for his dawning empire, and so trusted Mongol nobles learn to write. Later that same century, a great stone goes up with an inscription telling us that a skilled archer, Isunga, shot a target from 335 alts away, more than half a kilometer. The first words in the reveal who was there to witness it. Genghis Khan and his Mongol dignitaries. This is pre-classical written Mongol. It often resembles modern Mongolian, a gir is still a gir, but it preserves sounds that have since changed, like edur has since harmonized to udur. Those long vowels were actually two vowels split by kh, kahan, instead of khan, which, by the way, is why khan also gets spelled with two a's and a gh between. This official written language takes us back to the right time, but another line of evidence suggests it might be suspiciously archaic, how dignitaries wrote, but not how the khan spoke. A crucial piece of the Mongolian story was nearly forgotten, a history book disguised as a language instruction text was rediscovered by Russian Orthodox monk Palladius in China in the mid-1800s. This book was written entirely in Han Chinese characters, but despite appearances, it doesn't make sense if it's read in Chinese. Listen to the very first We meet again. What emerges is a long name-filled text telling the inside story of the man himself, his origins from Tingiri, his anda, his blood brother, his conquest with his general, struggle for succession, even a cameo by that same long-shot archer. Oh, and time and again you'll read how It all struck scholars and nomads alike as authentic, perhaps composed upon his very death, when nobles gathered together to remember his story, their story, and wrote down what came to be known as the secret history. It's from the right time, but something felt off. Idur had already changed to Udur. They were already dropping their middle xhs, and yet they kept around an initial xh, Khujaur. In all, this secret history looked different, mostly younger. Maybe written Mongol was too old to be the language of the khan. Maybe this was his Middle Mongol. So why not just roll back today's pronunciation and undo sound changes to revert to our best Middle Mongol accent? Is the question you ask yourself as we travel the open road through the Ordos in Inner Mongolia, to the site of the mausoleum of Chinggis Khan. Ordos became our horde, but it means palaces. His tomb remains a mystery, yet after his death, tent palaces wandered this land as a shrine to what one scholar terms Genghisid theology in Tengriism. A people called the Darkhat vowed to guard it forever, and their Mongolian is different. They're not alone. There are languages in Russia that inherit over 90% of their words from Middle Mongol, while one in China keeps less than half. As I promised, it's a lot of wandering, but the point is, there's not one Mongolian. It's a Mongolic family. Even my grammar, naively titled Mongolian, was teaching just one variety, khalkh. Linguists sifted through Mongolic cognates to piece together a common ancestor. Proto-Mongolic had a l, not x. It had no f's. The khan had a k, not x, and a final n hadn't merged with ng. So they were saying kakhan. Khs were dropping, but lingered at the start of words. Sometimes evidence conflicts. Was their garb a dipin or dekhin? Or it reveals quirks. Mongols used echo nouns for n things like that. Marimari for horses and morses. And look so much like Middle Mongol. Like another line of evidence pointing back to the exact same time. Only 800 years ago. It's a very young family compared to others we've met. It's hard to reach beyond that. So here he sits. Before him, we detect Turkic loans like his very title. Maybe dialects or even a link to this mysterious script. After him, many Mongolic descendants. And between, a linguistic bottleneck caused by a man who united a people and drew a line in the Gobi sand from which emerged a language family. Through old texts and modern voices, we still hear echoes of when he made a decree, he made a decree. But without saying the sound f. So add his linguistic legacy to the many accomplishments of a man who to us is Genghis Khan. Who in Mongolia is remembered as Chinggis Khan. But who in his own tongue may have been Chinggis Khahan. Stick around and subscribe for language.