Culture | Feature Report

Beyond the Classroom: How the Reform Reshaped Language, Identity, and the Future of a Generation

By Borjigin Manda

About this series:
 

Six Years After the Mongolian Bilingual Education Reform: How One Policy Reshaped a Generation, this three-part series looks at how the policy reshaped education, language use, cultural transmission, and educational choices in Southern Mongolia, and how its effects continue to shape a new generation.

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Author Bio

Borjigin Manda is the founder and editor of Southern Mongolian News. As a Southern Mongolian, he writes about language rights, cultural preservation, and public policy affecting Southern Mongolia, with a focus on documenting cultural identity and promoting greater understanding of the experiences of Southern Mongolians.

It was a small moment. But it points to a much larger question: when a language disappears from schools, public space, and everyday conversation, how long can it survive inside families alone?

Part II of this series, "When Nothing Changed," followed the reform into classrooms, textbooks, and examination halls — tracing how a policy promised to leave "nothing" unchanged ended up remaking Mongolian-language education from the inside out. This final installment follows the reform past the school gate, into the lives of young Southern Mongolians now old enough to reckon with what they did, and did not, inherit.

Language and the Weight of Identity

When the reform reached her hometown in a remote area of eastern Southern Mongolia, Sarnai (a pseudonym) had just started high school. Like many students her age, she did not fully understand what the policy would mean for her education or her mother tongue.

It was only later, after she entered university and began studying ethnology, that she began to understand what had changed — and what might be lost.

While putting together a class project on language policy, Sarnai went looking for the paperwork behind the change in her own hometown — not the regional-level documents behind the reform itself, which had been publicized widely enough, but the specific local notice that should have told her banner's schools when and how to stop teaching in Mongolian. She never found one. When the change was first implemented in her hometown, teachers had simply told students, in passing, that Mongolian classes were being discontinued. No circular, no dated notice, nothing bearing an official seal — just a line delivered at the front of a classroom.

The contradiction has stayed with her. Official public information continued to describe Mongolian-language education as part of the local education system. "In reality, we'd already stopped learning it," she says. The gap between the public record—abundant at the regional level, but difficult to trace in her own hometown—and what she had actually experienced left her simply confused.

Studying ethnology also changed how she thought about her own identity. Growing up, Sarnai had never given much thought to the connection between language and belonging — Mongolian class was simply another subject to pass. That changed after the reform. She began to understand that language was not just a school subject, but a link to her history, culture, and community. For her, protecting the language became inseparable from protecting a sense of identity.

"My younger brother is in eighth grade now," she says. "He stopped learning Mongolian back in third or fourth grade, and he's basically forgotten all of it. Will he still call himself Mongolian once he's out in the world? I think about that sometimes — if he leaves home someday, where is his sense of who he is supposed to come from?"

It's a divide showing up inside families across the region, not just hers: an older sibling who can still read a Mongolian textbook or write a school essay in it, a younger one who can follow a conversation at the dinner table but little more. Six years of uneven implementation have been enough to split what one generation learned from what the next did not — and the ability lost first is rarely the ability to speak.

A rough order keeps surfacing in how the language slips away. Understanding spoken Mongolian tends to survive longest — it asks the least of formal schooling; a child absorbs it simply by spending time around grandparents and parents. Reading comes next, and depends heavily on how many years of actual classroom instruction used Mongolian script rather than Chinese. Writing goes first, and is the hardest to recover once lost, because it demands not just vocabulary but grammar, spelling convention, and the kind of sustained, corrected practice that used to happen in a classroom — not at a dinner table. Sarnai's brother sits near one end of that order: he can still follow spoken Mongolian at home, but has already lost most of what he once could read or write.

The Circles Language Draws

For the young Southern Mongolians who still speak Mongolian fluently, the shrinking space of the language in public life has pushed many of them closer together. Mongolian-language ability has become a way people recognize one another — a marker of shared background, shared memories, and shared belonging. Many live in cities, where the language and cultural connections regularly draw them into the same dinners, conversations, and social circles.

That closeness has an edge to it, for those on the outside of it.

Tuul (a pseudonym) is ethnically Mongolian. Although she studied Mongolian in school, she grew up in an environment where Mandarin dominated daily life. Her family and social surroundings offered few opportunities to use Mongolian regularly, and she never developed the fluency that comes from living in a language every day.

At a gathering of young Mongolians, she found herself on the margins of her own community. Everyone else spoke Mongolian with ease and exchanged the same kinds of hometown memories — which gacha (village-level administrative unit) or banner they were from, which schools they had attended. Late into the evening, a few friends who had stayed behind began singing Mongolian folk songs together, unprompted. Tuul recognized the moment as something meaningful, but she did not know the words well enough to join. She had to decline. She felt, she says, like she'd broken the mood.

"You realize they're a very tightly bound group," she says. "Singing together, drinking together — and the one person completely outside that atmosphere is me."

For Tuul, the experience was not simply about language ability. It revealed how much of cultural belonging is carried through ordinary moments: a song remembered from childhood, a joke understood without explanation, a hometown story shared in a familiar language. A person can still identify as Mongolian and yet feel distant from the everyday world through which that identity is expressed.

Tuul describes what she sees around her as a kind of "crisis" — one that extends beyond language into how young Mongolians imagine their own lives. Her doctoral research, which she settled on last year, looks at how a new generation of Mongolian youth relates to, and is shaping the future of, their own language. She was struck to find how many of her subjects described futures bounded almost entirely by ethnic identity. Asked about their ideal partner and their plans after graduation, most told her the same thing: they hoped to marry another Mongolian, and to return home.

"Whether it's their own culture or their own way of making a living, they don't feel like they're the ones in charge of it," Tuul says. "They can only receive it, passively."

That passivity, she argues, has to be understood against a longer history of policy whiplash. In the roughly two decades after the autonomous region's founding, Mongolian-language education was vigorously promoted. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, Mongolian schools were forcibly shut down and converted into Han Chinese schools. Mongolian instruction was gradually restored during the Reform and Opening period, accompanied by a vigorous Mongolian cultural movement among intellectuals. But from the 1990s onward, urbanization and the market economy steadily rewarded Chinese-language fluency with better educational and job prospects; enrollment in Mongolian-medium schools fell year after year, schools closed, and the number of young people who genuinely spoke Mongolian kept shrinking.

The 2020 bilingual education reform did not create the language crisis from nothing; rather, in her view, it intensified a decline that had already been developing for decades.

Tuul's observation echoes a broader argument made by historian Christopher Atwood, who wrote in 2020 that even within Mongolian-medium schools, a "hidden curriculum" had long signaled that Chinese language and institutions carried greater practical value than Mongolian ones — a quiet signal to students, absorbed well before any policy change, about which language mattered for getting ahead. Strip away most of the remaining subjects taught in Mongolian, as the 2020 reform did, and that signal only sharpens: the language spoken at home becomes harder to separate from a language that no longer opens doors.

 What a Language Carries

For Gerel (a pseudonym), the value of the language revealed itself in an unexpectedly ordinary place: his parents' kitchen.

He once asked his mother how to describe, in Mongolian, the steps of making milk tea — a dish his family had prepared for as long as he could remember. She walked him through the vocabulary step by step, and Gerel was startled to realize he had never heard most of it before. Growing up, his parents had simply told him what to do, standing beside him as he worked — never what each step was actually called. It turned out the practice he'd absorbed his whole life had a whole second layer to it, a layer made of words, that had never been passed down alongside the practice itself.

After finishing high school, Gerel left for Japan to study. Away from his familiar surroundings, he began looking at his own experience from a different perspective. For the first time, he started asking not just what had shaped his relationship to his mother tongue, but what he could actually do about it.

Gerel had attended Han Chinese schools growing up and could manage only the most basic spoken Mongolian. Although he could understand some everyday expressions, he had never developed the foundation needed to read, write, or use the language comfortably. As he began learning Mongolian on his own, he quickly discovered how difficult it was to rebuild something that had never been fully established.

The experience also forced him to confront a deeper question about identity. Growing up, Gerel knew he was Mongolian, but that identity existed mostly through family background rather than through language or daily cultural practice. Without the language, he wondered what connection remained between a person and the community they came from.

It is a question shared by others of his generation. Bilgee (a pseudonym), who grew up speaking Mongolian, describes language as inseparable from ethnic identity.

"How can you call yourself Mongolian and not speak Mongolian?" he asks.

For young people like Gerel, that question is not an accusation but a painful reminder of what has been lost. They did not necessarily reject their language; many simply grew up without the opportunity to inherit it.

When Gerel later tried to teach himself Mongolian, the obstacles were immediate: many distinct letters in Mongolian script share identical written forms, and a single syllable can carry as many as four possible sounds. Dictionaries were dense, and existing textbooks often assumed a level of background knowledge he did not have.

Mongolian is already hard enough to learn," he says. "If the textbooks are this difficult on top of it, how much determination would someone need just to get through them?" That frustration eventually became the subject of his own research: producing a more accessible, illustrated introduction to written Mongolian for beginners like himself.

What Should Have Been Inherited

For an increasing number of young Southern Mongolians, learning Mongolian no longer resembles the effortless way children usually acquire a mother tongue. Instead, it increasingly requires the determination, textbooks, and self-study normally associated with learning a foreign language.

Gerel's experience reflects one side of that reality. Bayar's reflects the other: one is trying to reclaim a language never fully inherited, while the other is trying not to lose a language already learned but increasingly difficult to sustain.

Bayar (a pseudonym) grew up speaking Mongolian and completed his education in Mongolian-medium schools before leaving Southern Mongolia for university. Yet even with that foundation, maintaining the language has become a challenge. Reading remains the skill he struggles with most.

The challenge, he says, is not a lack of interest, but the result of years of reduced exposure and practice. Only after leaving home did he truly begin to appreciate what his mother tongue meant to him. That awareness became most vivid in an unexpected place: his own dreams.

He remembers noticing the change there first. Before his second year at university, everyone in his dreams—even Han Chinese classmates—spoke Mongolian. Then one night, Chinese entered his dreams for the first time. He woke up startled.

"Is it because I haven't used Mongolian enough? Or does living here actually change the way I think?"

For a time, both languages appeared in his dreams.

Today, Mongolian rarely does.

The Future of a Generation

None of these stories ends in quite the same way.

Sarnai came to understand her mother tongue only after realizing how quietly it had disappeared from her own education.

Tuul discovered that learning a language in school was not the same as living through it every day.

Gerel found himself studying his own mother tongue with the determination of someone learning a foreign language, trying to recover what should have been passed down naturally.

Bayar noticed the change only after it had already reached his dreams.

Taken individually, these are personal experiences. Together, they trace something much larger: the gradual weakening of the relationship between a generation and the language that once connected it to family, community, and history.

Language is rarely lost all at once. It slips away in stages—first from classrooms, then from books, then from everyday conversations, until one day it survives more as memory than as habit. Each of the young people in this series stands at a different point along that process.

What is now being inherited is not simply less Mongolian. It is a language increasingly separated from the institutions—schools, examinations, public life, and official recognition—that once allowed it to be transmitted naturally from one generation to the next. What remains depends ever more on individual families and personal effort.

Whether that will be enough is a question that no policy document can answer.

End of series 

This concludes Six Years After the Mongolian Bilingual Education Reform: How One Policy Reshaped a Generation, a three-part feature examining how the 2020 bilingual education reform reshaped language, education, and cultural identity in Southern Mongolia.

Names marked as pseudonyms in this series are used to protect the identities of sources.