An Overview of Mongolic-Kazakh Linguistic Relations with A Focus on The Kazakh Variety Spoken in Mongolia

The Mongolic-Kazakh relationship is a linguistic, cultural, and geographical interaction that dates to ancient times and still continues today. Both linguistically and culturally, Kazakh and Mongolian people have more similarities rather than differences. Mongolic-Kazakh language contacts go back to the period of the Old Turkic inscriptions and even earlier in the Proto-Turkic and Proto-Mongolic context. The ages of Genghis Khan, the Mongol Khanates, the Kazakh Khanates, and the Dzungar Khanate have been times of strong language interaction, and the language contact continues to these days, between the Kazakh variety spoken in Mongolia and the Mongolian language. In Turkology, several studies examined Mongolian-Tuvan, Mongolian-Turkish, and Mongolian-Kyrgyz language relations. Still, only a few have been carried out on the relationship between Mongolic languages and Kazakh, and none of them is recent. This paper examines the linguistic relations between Mongolian and common Kazakh, as well as between Mongolian and the Kazakh variety spoken in Mongolia. The former is discussed from the lexical point of view, while lexical, morphological and socio-linguistic aspects are examined for the latter.