The lost echoes of the Khitan language and its undeciphered scripts

Cultures · Published 3 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Once the official voice of the Liao Empire, the Khitan language remains a linguistic puzzle. Despite having two distinct writing systems, much of its vocabulary and grammar remains a mystery, leaving scholars to debate whether it was a branch of the Mongolic family or something entirely different.

Spoken across Northeast Asia from the 4th to the 13th century CE, Khitan served as the administrative tongue for the Liao Empire (907–1125) and later the Qara Khitai (1124–1218). The language was expressed through two mutually exclusive scripts: a logographic large script, similar to Chinese, and a small script that functioned as a syllabary. The latter was eventually replaced in 1191 by the Jurchen script following the rise of the Jurchen-speaking Jin dynasty (1115–1234).

Deciphering Khitan is a complex task because the corpus of known words remains narrow. While many linguists link it to Mongolic languages, scholar Juha Janhunen suggests it might actually be a 'Para-Mongolic' language, meaning it is radically different from the historically known Mongolic group. Adding to the complexity, Alexander Vovin argued in 2017 that the language contains several Koreanic loanwords. These may have originated from the language of Goguryeo, as both the Khitan Liao and the Korean Goryeo dynasties claimed to be successors of that ancient state.

Historical errors have further clouded our understanding. During the Qing dynasty, the Qianlong Emperor mistakenly identified the Khitan people with the Solons. This error led him to use the Solon language to attempt to 'correct' Chinese character transcriptions of Khitan names in his imperial linguistic projects. Today, while we have some lexical items—such as the term 'Tao Saiyier' for the fifth lunar month—the language remains only partially reconstructed, a ghost of a civilization that once dominated the steppe.

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