Once the rulers of the largest land empire that has ever existed on earth, the historical Mongols of Chinggis Khan left a linguistic heritage which today survives in the form of more than a dozen different languages, collectively termed Mongolic. For general linguistic theory, the Mongolic languages offer interesting insights to problems of areal typology and structural change. An understanding of the Mongolic language family is also a prerequisite for the study of Mongolian and Central Eurasian history and culture. This volume is the first comprehensive treatment of the Mongolic languages in English, written by an international team of specialists.

Mongolian is the principal language spoken by some five million ethnic Mongols living in Outer and Inner Mongolia, as well as in adjacent parts of Russia and China. The spoken language is divided into a number of mutually intelligible dialects, while for writing two separate written languages are used: Cyrillic Khalkha in Outer Mongolia (the Republic of Mongolia) and Written Mongol in Inner Mongolia (P. R. China). In this grammatical description, the focus is on the standard varieties of the spoken language, as used in broadcasting, education, and everyday casual speech. The dialectology of the language, and its background as a member of the Mongolic language family, are also dicussed. Mongolian is an agglutinating language with a well-developed suffixal morphology. In the areal framework, the language is a typical member of the trans-Eurasian Ural-Altaic complex with features such as vowel harmony, verb-final sentence structure, and complex chains of non-finite verbal phrases.

This book is a grammar of Mangghuer, a Mongolic language. Its primary importance is as a systematic grammatical description of a little-known language. It also makes a significant contribution to comparative Mongolic studies.

This book provides the first comprehensive description of the phonology and phonetics of Standard Mongolian, known as the Halh (Khalkha) dialect and spoken in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the Republic of Mongolia. It is also the first account in any language of the historical phonology of the entire Mongolian group of languages. The synchronic phonology is based on data collected by the authors and their own phonological analyses. The historical phonology is based on original research on the Halh, on published Chinese and Mongolian sources for the modern Mongolic languages, and on their reconstruction of Old Mongolian from the medieval written sources.

This book, now back in print having been unavailable for many years, is one of the most important contributions to Turkic and Mongolic linguistics, and to the contentious 'Altaic theory'. Proponents of the theory hold that Turkish is part of the Altaic family, and that Turkish accordingly exists in parallel with Mongolic and Tungusic-Manchu. Whatever the truth of this theory, Gerard Clauson's erudite and vigorously expressed views, based as they were on a remarkable knowledge of the lexicon of the Altaic languages and his outstanding work in the field of Turkish lexicography, continues to command respect and deserve attention.

William Rozycki's Mongol Elements in Manchu is a masterful work on the subject of Manchu and Mongolian linguistics. It identifies, analyzes, and categorizes occurrences of Mongol loan words in Manchu written documents in order to better understand the relationship between these two languages. In all, it examines 1,381 individual word correspondences and places them into eight individual categories: recent loans from Mongol to Manchu, early loans from Mongol to Manchu/Jurchen, ancient loans from Mongol to Tungus, pre-loan correspondences, loans from Manchu to Mongol, problematic cases, loans from Chinese to Mongol and Manchu, and dismissible cases. Both the linguistic analysis and comprehensive lexicon provide by this book make it an indispensable source for anyone studying or interested in the relationship between the Mongol and Manchu languages.

The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages provides a comprehensive account of the Transeurasian languages, and is the first major reference work in the field since 1965. The term 'Transeurasian' refers to a large group of geographically adjacent languages that includes five uncontroversial linguistic families: Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic. The historical connection between these languages, however, constitutes one of the most debated issues in historical comparative linguistics. In the present book, a team of leading international scholars in the field take a balanced approach to this controversy, integrating different theoretical frameworks, combining both functional and formal linguistics, and showing that genealogical and areal approaches are in fact compatible with one another. The volume is divided into five parts. Part I deals with the historical sources and periodization of the Transeurasian languages and their classification and typology. In Part II, chapters provide individual structural overviews of the Transeurasian languages and the linguistic subgroups that they belong to, while Part III explores Transeurasian phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics from a comparative perspective. Part IV offers a range of areal and genealogical explanations for the correlations observed in the preceding parts. Finally, Part V combines archaeological, genetic, and anthropological perspectives on the identity of speakers of Transeurasian languages. The Oxford Guide to the Transeurasian Languages will be an indispensable resource for specialists in Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages and for anyone with an interest in Transeurasian and comparative linguistics more broadly.