Mongolian Letter Sha

It writes the “sh” sound, as in English “ship.”

The Latin spellings sh and š are transliterations: ways to write the same Mongolian consonant with Latin letters. A following vowel completes the syllable; for example, ᠱᠠ is romanized sha.

On its own, ᠱ gives a consonant sound, not a full word. Traditional spelling reflects older literary Mongolian, so the whole word—not this letter alone—determines its reading in modern speech.

Where did the Mongolian script come from?

It was adapted from Old Uyghur in the early thirteenth century.

Old Uyghur script came from Sogdian, which descended from Aramaic. Old Uyghur shifted from horizontal right-to-left writing to vertical columns, a layout Mongolian inherited.

Traditional accounts connect the adoption to Uyghur scribes at Chinggis Khan’s court and name Tata-tonga. The script served the court’s need for records, accounts, and official documents. The Yisüngge stele shows another public use: a memorial inscription.

Why does Mongolian sha look different in a word?

The letter stays the same; its shape changes to fit its place.

Mongolian is cursive and normally joins letters; a letter may take an initial, medial, or final shape. It is written top to bottom in columns running left to right, and text placed in horizontal lines may be rotated. An unjoined or sideways sample can reflect how the font or layout displays it, not a different character.

Traditional Mongolian writing remained in continuous use in Inner Mongolia and elsewhere in China through 2024. In Mongolia, Cyrillic replaced it in the early 1940s, and traditional writing returned in the early 1990s. The wider script family also includes Todo, Manchu, and Sibe, which share some letters with Mongolian and have some separately encoded forms.