Tamil and Mongolian: The Script Keepers

There is something immediately striking about Mongolian script — not just that it is vertical, which is unusual enough in a world dominated by horizontal writing, but the particular way in which it is vertical. The letters descend from top to bottom in columns, and the columns are read from left to right: the precise opposite of the direction used by Chinese and Japanese, which are also vertical. A page of traditional Mongolian feels like nothing else in the world's writing systems. It has a quality of height, of flow, of unhurried descent — calligraphy with the long patience of the steppe built into it. Once you know what you are looking at, you will not mistake it for anything else.

Mongolian belongs to the Mongolic language family — a group of related languages spoken across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia in China, and parts of Russia and Central Asia — which has no established genetic connection to any other language family on earth. This is a more contested area of linguistics than it might appear: there has been a long debate about whether Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages form a larger "Altaic" grouping, but the majority of modern linguists now believe the similarities between these families are the result of prolonged contact and borrowing rather than shared ancestry. The Mongolic family, in other words, stands on its own — as the Dravidian family does, and as Tamil, the oldest and most documented Dravidian language, does within it. Both are languages whose deepest roots go back to origins that have not been fully traced. Both are comfortable with that fact.

The traditional Mongolian script is roughly eight hundred years old. In the early thirteenth century, as Genghis Khan consolidated his empire, he commissioned the adaptation of the Uyghur script — itself descended from Sogdian, a Central Asian trade language — for the Mongolian language. The scribe credited with this work was a man named Tata-tonga, a Uyghur official captured during Genghis Khan's campaigns, who adapted his own script's letterforms to fit the sounds of Mongolian. The result was a script that has been in use ever since, in one form or another, across eight centuries. By the standards of the world's writing systems, this is respectable but not exceptional. Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions date to around the third century BCE, and the Tamil script has been in continuous use for over two thousand years. Mongolian arrived at writing considerably later — but the comparison is not really about age. It is about what happens to a script under pressure.

In 1941, under Soviet influence, Mongolia replaced the traditional vertical script with Cyrillic. The reasons were political: the Soviet Union was standardising scripts across its sphere of influence, and Cyrillic served that agenda efficiently. Overnight, generations of Mongolians found themselves unable to read documents, literature, and inscriptions written in their own language. The traditional script did not disappear entirely — across the border in Inner Mongolia, which is part of China, it was never replaced, and the traditional form continued to be taught and used. This matters. For eighty years, the keepers of the traditional script were, in a very practical sense, the Mongolians living in China, not in Mongolia itself. Then, on the second of January 2025, Mongolia formally restored the traditional script alongside Cyrillic as co-official — a decision that had been building for years and that, when it finally arrived, felt less like a policy change and more like a homecoming. Tamil has never faced this particular form of dispossession, but Tamil speakers will understand the logic of the restoration immediately: some things are worth recovering at considerable cost, because their absence is a kind of silence that accumulates.

At the level of grammar, Tamil and Mongolian share the structural features that have appeared, in one form or another, in every article in this series: both are agglutinative, building long words by stacking suffixes onto a root; both are SOV languages, placing the verb at the end of the sentence; and neither assigns grammatical gender to nouns. Mongolian has a case system of roughly eight cases that marks the grammatical role of each noun in a sentence, while Tamil achieves similar ends through its own system of case suffixes. Both languages give the impression, to a speaker of English, of sentences that save their meaning for the very last word — a habit of withholding that can feel, at first encounter, almost theatrical. You do not know what has happened to the subject until the verb arrives. In Tamil, in Mongolian, and in Japanese, Finnish, and Georgian before them, the verb is where the sentence finally decides what it has been building toward.

The literary traditions of the two languages offer an interesting contrast. Tamil's Sangam poetry — the earliest surviving classical Tamil literature, composed roughly between 300 BCE and 300 CE — is predominantly secular: poems about love, landscape, war, and the textures of daily life, addressed to no deity and beholden to no single patron. The oldest surviving Mongolian literary work is the Монголын нууц товчоо (Mongγol-un niuca tobca'an), known in English as "The Secret History of the Mongols," composed around 1228, shortly after the death of Genghis Khan. It is part epic, part genealogy, part mythology — a record of where the Mongols came from, what Genghis Khan was, and what the empire meant to the people who built it. Where Sangam poetry looks inward — to the individual heart, the particular landscape, the private exchange — the Secret History looks outward, to nation and dynasty and the sweep of continental history. Two first literatures, shaped by two very different relationships to power and land.

What Tamil and Mongolian ultimately share is this: in both cultures, a script is understood to be more than a tool. It is an argument — about identity, about continuity, about who a people are when they write something down. Tamil has made this argument continuously and without interruption for over two thousand years. Mongolian made it, then had it interrupted for eighty years by a government that did not belong to it, then made it again. The two stories are not the same. But the conviction behind them — that a script, once yours, remains yours even when it is taken — is exactly the same. Script keepers, both of them, by two different routes.