Mongolian

Mongolian (in Mongolian script: ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯ ᠬᠡᠯᠡ Moŋɣol kele; in Mongolian Cyrillic: монгол хэл, mongol khel) is the official language of Mongolia and both the most widely-spoken and best-known member of the Mongolic language family. 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 Mongolian residents of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

In Mongolia, the Khalkha dialect, written in Cyrillic (and at times in Latin for social networking), is predominant, while in Inner Mongolia, the language is dialectally more diverse and is written in the traditional Mongolian script.

Common difficulties

The Foreign Service Institute has classified Mongolian as a "Hard" language. It is estimated that learning Mongolian to a Professional Working Proficiency in the language (a score of Speaking-3/Reading-3 on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale) will take an average of 44 weeks (1100 class hours).