in 1941, a few decades after mongolia became a communist state, the cyrillic alphabet replaced mongolian script likely due to influence from their communist ally, the soviet union. after the fall of communism, mongolia made mongolian script official alongside cyrillic to revive mongolian culture. however, cyrillic is still more common due to the lack of education in mongolian writing, the lack of money to support it, and the difficulty of typing mongolian on a computer. also, more mongolians can read cyrillic than mongolian script. in inner mongolia, on the other hand, most ethnic mongols do not know cyrillic and can only read mongolian in the mongolian script.