Mongolian Da and the Script That Never Stopped in Inner Mongolia

While the Mongolian People's Republic moved to Cyrillic in the twentieth century, the traditional script continued in ordinary daily use across the border in Inner Mongolia, where it remains the standard written form of Mongolian. That continuity matters for the script's survival and for its present character. Publishing, schooling, newspapers, signage and administration have gone on in the traditional script without a break, so the practical work of adapting it to typewriters, typesetting, computers and the internet was done by a community that needed it to work rather than by antiquarians reviving it.

Much of the font development, the input method design and the standardisation effort behind Mongolian in Unicode came from that side of the border. The two written traditions have diverged somewhat, as separated written traditions do, with different vocabularies for modern things and different conventions in spelling and layout. When Mongolia turned back toward the traditional script in recent decades, it turned toward something that had gone on being used rather than toward a reconstruction, which is a considerable practical advantage and a rare one. Scripts that fall out of use are usually revived from books; this one was still in the hands of the people writing it.