Various Mongolian writing systems have been devised for the Mongolian language over the centuries, and from a variety of scripts. The oldest and native script, called simply the Mongolian script, has been the predominant script during most of Mongolian history, and is still in active use today in the Inner Mongolia region of China and has de facto use in Mongolia.
It has in turn spawned several alphabets, either as attempts to fix its perceived shortcomings, or to allow the notation of other languages, such as Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan. In the 20th century, Mongolia briefly switched to the Latin script, but then almost immediately replaced it with the modified Cyrillic alphabet because of its smaller discrepancy between written and spoken form, contributing to the success of the literacy campaign, which increased the literacy rate from 17.3% to 73.5% between 1941 and 1950. Nevertheless, Mongols living in Inner Mongolia as well as other parts of China continued to use alphabets based on the traditional Mongolian script.
