Analysis of the use of phonology-based Mongolian orthographic rules in university students’ writing

Abstract

Orthographic competence is essential for academic writing and maintaining standardized Mongolian spelling. This study examines university students’ use of phonology-based orthographic rules through corpus and statistical analyses. A 10,000-word corpus of authentic student writing was analyzed using Microsoft Word Review Count, AntConc, and IBM SPSS Statistics 29.0. The analysis identified 3,761 misspelled words (37.6%), including 1,829 phonology-based errors (48.6%). The most frequent errors involved elided reduced vowels (7.9%), “-ii” and “-y” suffixes (5.1%), non-elided reduced vowels (4.0%), soft sign transformation (3.5%), and vowel–sonorant correspondence (3.1%). Foreign-word spelling, vowel distinctions, non-elided reduced vowels, and vowel harmony also presented substantial difficulties. These findings provide empirical evidence for improving Mongolian orthography teaching and developing evidence-based academic writing instruction.