The most distinctive feature of the Buriat dialects is the transformation of all affricates into fricatives or spirants. Sharing with the Khalkha and Kalmyk-Oirat the splitting of Middle Mongolian j and ch into j or ch before i and dz or ts before all other vowels, Buriat has gone further, transforming j and ch into zh and sh, and dz and ts into z
and s. Thus sharga, “sled” (from Middle Mongolian chirgha), becomes a homonym with the horse color sharga, “light bay” (Middle Mongolian shirgha). Perhaps to avoid this sort of convergence, Buriat changes Middle Mongolian s to h before a vowel. Thus, Middle Mongo- lian chagha’an sara, “white moon, Lunar New Year” (Mongolian tsagaan sar), becomes sagaan hara.
Buriat shares with the East Mongolian dialect of Inner Mongolia the Manchurian areal feature of replac- ing e by ¹ (conventionally written e). Short ö disap- pears, replaced by ü in the initial syllable and e afterward, so that Khalkha tölöölögch becomes in Buriat tülöölegshe.
Buriat and Khalkha share the merger of final -n and -ng into -ng (conventionally written -n). Like Kalmyk-Oirat, however, Buriat retains the unstable -n in the nominative (thus, Buriat oshon, spark versus Mongolian och) and has formed personal conjugations from postposed pronouns (for example, yabadagbi, “I go,” from yabadag, “go(es)” + bi, “I,” or yerebesh, “you came,” from yerebe “came” + shi, “you”). While a few idiosyncratic sound changes resemble Kalmyk-Oirat, Buriat morphology is quite distinct from either Kalmyk-Oirat or Mongolian with its accusative in - iiye rather than -iig, ablative in -ha (from reconstructed - sa) rather than -aas, and genitive after consonants in -ai, rather than -iin. Buriat also contains unique forms (e.g., niutag, homeland, compared to Mongolian nutag, Kalmyk nutg; or˘ıyool, “peak,” compared to Mongolian orgil, Kalmyk örgl), and unique vocabulary, such as zon, “peo- ple,” and basagan, “girl.”
Buriats have been in close contact with Russians longer than any other Mongolic people and in addition to usual recent political and technical vocabulary, have a number of old, assimilated loanwords such as büülkhe or khileemen, “bread” (from búlkha or khleb), khartaabkha, “potato” (from kartófel’), and khapuusta, “cabbage” (from kapústa).
SCRIPTS
The UIGHUR-MONGOLIAN SCRIPT was introduced among
Russia’s Buriats in the 18th century from Mongolia. By the 19th century there was a significant body of Buddhist religious texts, genealogies, chronicles, law codes, and primary school textbooks. In 1895 the first bilingual Rus- sian-Buriat Mongolian newspaper was published. The vocabulary, morphology, and orthography of Buriat Uighur-Mongolian works clearly reflect the distinctive features of the Buriat dialects. Czarist regulations, how- ever, blocked the Uighur-Mongolian script from spread- ing to the Buriats west of Lake Baikal. There Christian Buriats Iakov V. Boldonov (1808–49) and N. S. Boldonov (1835–99) designed a Cyrillic script for Buriat and printed pamphlets, liturgies, and catechetical works from 1840, producing a modest degree of Cyrillic literacy.
During the 1905 Revolution the new Buriat intelli- gentsia demanded an end to the educational separation of
the western Buriats. The learned lama AGWANG DORZHIEV (1853–1937) introduced a modified Uighur-Mongolian script called the Vagindra script after its creator’s pen name, intended for use among the western Buriats. The script was popularized by Buriat intellectuals from 1905 to 1910 but never achieved success. The Latin script introduced by the Buriat intellectual Bazar Baradiin (1878–1937) in 1910 likewise did not succeed, although his device, borrowed from Finnish, of writing long vow- els with double letters was later adopted into Buriat and Mongolian Cyrillic scripts.
After the Russian Revolution of 1917 overthrew the czarist religious and educational policies, the new Soviet regime strongly promoted Buriat literacy in the Uighur- Mongolian script, especially after the 1923 administrative unification of the eastern and western Buriats. Yet some western Buriats still preferred Cyrillicization. Suddenly, in 1930 Latinization became the general policy for Soviet nationalities. After discussions Bazar Baradiin produced a new Latin script in January 1931 based on the literary language, which he hoped would be used by all Mongols, not just Buriats. When it was decided that summer to choose a living dialect, not a literary language, as the new script’s standard, Tsongol was chosen, one close to Khalkha Mongolian.
In 1936, with the growth of Russian nationalism under Joseph Stalin, the Khori dialect, one very different from Khalkha, was chosen as the standard dialect. Finally, in 1938 it was decided to switch the Buriats from the Latin script to a new Cyrillic script based on the Khori dialect. A new design, relatively close in structure to the former Latin script but quite different from the previously introduced Kalmyk Cyrillic scripts, was cre- ated in 1939. The only new letters used for Cyrillic Buriat were ö, ü, and the distinctive Buriat h. In imitation of Bazar Baradiin’s Latin script, long vowels were marked by doubling rather than a diacritical. Rather than using the “half i” ( ˘ ) for the consonant y, e was always written as э, and the Cyrillic palatalized vowels were used to mark the consonant y-: я (ya), e (ye), ë (yo), and ю (yu or yü). Finally, the Cyrillic ы (y, or back i) was intro- duced for the long ii in certain case endings. All of these devices were later also adopted in designing Mongolia’s
Cyrillic script (see CYRILLIC-SCRIPT MONGOLIAN). The
Buriat Cyrillic script has been used until the present
both in the BURIAT REPUBLIC and in the Ust’-Orda and
Aga autonomous areas, which were separated from it in 1937.
See also KALMYK-OIRAT LANGUAGE AND SCRIPT; MON- GOLIAN LANGUAGE.
Further reading: James E. Bosson, Buriat Reader
(Bloomington: Indiana University, 1962); Yeshen-Khorlo Dugarova-Montgomery and Robert Montgomery, “The Buriat Alphabet of Agvan Dorzhiev,” in Mongolia in the Twentieth Century: Landlocked Cosmopolitan, ed. Stephen Kotkin and Bruce A. Elleman (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E.
N
Sharpe 1999), 79–97; Juha Janhunen, Material on Manchurian Khamnigan Mongol (Helsinki: Castrenianum Complex of the University of Helsinki and the Finno- Ugrian Society, 1990).
Buriat Republic The Buriat Republic is the main homeland of the South Siberian Buriat Mongols. Founded in 1923 as an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) within the Soviet Union, the republic adopted a new constitution as a constituent republic within the Russian Federation in 1992. The ASSR originally included the Aga, Ust’-Orda, and Ol’khon districts, but they were
stripped from the republic’s territory in 1937. (See AGA
BURIAT AUTONOMOUS AREA and UST’-ORDA BURIAT
AUTONOMOUS AREA.) In 1989 the republic’s population was 1,038,252, of which 249,525, or 24 percent, were Buriat. The capital is ULAN-UDE. (For the history and cul- ture of the Buriats as an ethnic group, seeBURIATS.)