Jan-Olof Svantesson, Anna Tsendina, Anastasia Karlsson and Vivan Franze´n (2005). The phonology of Mongolian. (The Phonology of the World’s Languages.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. xix+314.

This book describes the phonology of Halh (Khalkha) Mongolian in detail, and provides an overview of ten other modern Mongolic languages (Buriad, Kamnigan, Oirad/Kalmuck, Dagur, Shira Yugur, Monguor, Santa, Bonan, Kangjia and Moghol). Its empirical focus is on vowel harmony, epenthesis and syllabification, laryngeal oppositions, reduplication, loanword phonology, historical vowel shifts and consonantal phonemicisation. The book largely takes a historical-comparative approach, and is presented within the framework of CV Phonology (Clements & Keyser 1983), with a highly articulatorily based approach to features (a` la Wood 1979, e.g. [velar], [pharyngeal], [palatal] as features corresponding to action of the styloglossus, hyoglossus and genoglossus muscles respectively). The authors (henceforth STKF) form a team of experts on historical phonology, Old Mongolic texts, and prosody and intonation; the second author is a native speaker of Mongolian. In this review I will provide an overview of the phonology of Mongolian, based on the book, and attempt to make clear the importance of the phenomena for phonological typology and phonological theory. What follows will be a description of Halh, the standard dialect of Ulaanbaatar, unless otherwise noted.