Mongolic

The Mongolic language family comprises approximately 13 languages and dialects spoken by around 6–7 million people across Mongolia, Inner Mongolia (China), Russia (Buryatia and Kalmykia), and parts of Central Asia. Despite its relatively small number of speakers, Mongolic achieved extraordinary historical reach through the Mongol Empire of the 13th–14th centuries CE — the largest contiguous land empire in history — which temporarily spread the Mongolian language as a prestige administrative language from Korea to Persia.

Proto-Mongolic is thought to have originated on the Eastern Eurasian steppe, in the region of modern eastern Mongolia and the Manchuria-Mongolia border area. Ancient DNA from the Mongolian steppe confirms that the populations associated with Mongolic cultural traditions had a primarily East Asian (or Eastern Eurasian) genetic profile, distinct from the more mixed East-West Eurasian profile of earlier steppe populations such as the Xiongnu. The Mongols and their Turkic-speaking predecessors on the steppe were genetically and linguistically distinct, despite the cultural similarities imposed by a shared pastoral nomadic lifestyle.

The Mongol conquests of the 13th century — Genghis Khan's unification of the steppe tribes and his descendants' campaigns across Eurasia — were among the most demographically destructive events of the medieval period. Ancient DNA from post-conquest Central Asia, Iran, and China shows increased East Asian ancestry consistent with Mongolian admixture in conquered populations. The short-lived Pax Mongolica also created the conditions for massive cultural and biological exchange across Eurasia, potentially accelerating the spread of plague (Yersinia pestis) that caused the Black Death.

The Kalmyks represent a western extension of Mongolic: descendants of the Oirat Mongols who migrated to the lower Volga steppe in the 17th century, they maintain a Mongolic language and Tibetan Buddhist culture as a minority population in the Russian Federation. Buryat, spoken in Siberian Russia around Lake Baikal, is the most northern Mongolic variety and preserves archaic features. The relationship of Mongolic to Turkic and Tungusic (forming the proposed Altaic macro-family) remains debated and is rejected by most mainstream historical linguists.