Written Mongolian is not uniform, but varies greatly in different periods of history and in different types of literature. Therefore, this grammar pays special attention to the characteristics of the pre-classical and classical written language, on one side, and to the peculiarities of the Buddhist religious and secular literature, on the other.

The grammar contains a detailed description of the sounds and a thorough discussion of the script and orthography. The morphologic part deals with the derivation of words and accidence (i. e. declension, conjugation, etc.). This book by Nicholas Poppe was the first grammar of the Mongolian written language ever published outside Russia.