Latin script

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Latin Roman
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	c. 700 BC – present
Direction	Left-to-right  languages of the Americas; the languages of Oceania, incl. the Malay Archipelago; and a number of languages of Asia such as Vietnamese . Official script in: 132 sovereign states  Albania  Andorra  Angola  Antigua and Barbuda  Argentina  Australia  Austria  Azerbaijan  Bahamas  Barbados  Belgium  Belize  Benin  Bolivia  Botswana  Brazil  Burkina Faso  Burundi  Cameroon  Canada  Cape Verde  Central African Republic  Chile  Colombia  The Congo  Democratic Republic of Congo  Costa Rica  Cote D'Ivoire  Croatia  Cuba  Czech Republic  Denmark  Dominica  Dominican Republic  East Timor  Ecuador  El Salvador  Equatorial Guinea  Estonia  Eswatini  Fiji  Finland  France  Gabon  Gambia  Ghana  Germany  Grenada  Guatemala  Guinea  Guinea-Bissau  Guyana  Haiti  Honduras  Hungary  Iceland  India  Indonesia  Ireland  Italy  Jamaica  Kenya  Kiribati  Latvia  Lesotho  Liberia  Liechtenstein  Lithuania  Luxembourg  Madagascar  Malawi  Malaysia  Mali  Malta  Marshall Islands  Mauritius  Mexico  Micronesia  Moldova  Monaco  Mozambique  Namibia  Nauru  Netherlands  New Zealand  Nicaragua  Niger  Nigeria  Norway  Palau  Panama  Papua New Guinea  Paraguay  Peru  Philippines  Poland  Portugal  Romania  Rwanda  Saint Kitts and Nevis  Saint Lucia  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines  Samoa  San Marino  São Tomé and Príncipe  Senegal  Seychelles  Sierra Leone  Slovakia  Slovenia  Solomon Islands  South Africa  South Sudan  Spain  Suriname  Sweden   Switzerland  Tanzania  Togo  Tonga  Trinidad and Tobago  Turkey  Turkmenistan  Tuvalu  Uganda  United Kingdom  United States  Uruguay  Uzbekistan  Vanuatu  Vatican City  Venezuela  Vietnam  Zambia  Zimbabwe Co-official script in: 15 sovereign states  Bosnia and Herzegovina  Brunei  Chad  Comoros  Cyprus  Djibouti  Eritrea  India  Kazakhstan  Kosovo  Montenegro  North Macedonia  Pakistan  Serbia  Singapore[a]  Somalia  Sudan 3 international organizations  European Union  ASEAN  United Nations
Related scripts
Parent systems	Latin characters in Unicode
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, and technically Latin writing system is an

exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.

The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet, which are the same letters as the English alphabet.

Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system^[1] and is the

writing system in the world. Latin script is used as the standard method of writing the languages of Western and Central Europe, most of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania, as well as many languages in other parts of the world.

Name

The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome (though some of the capital letters are Greek in origin). In the context of transliteration, the term "romanization" (British English: "romanisation") is often found.^[2][3] Unicode uses the term "Latin"^[4] as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).^[5]

The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as the Roman numerals. The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.

ISO basic Latin alphabet

Uppercase Latin alphabet	A	B	C	D	E	F	G	H	I	J	K	L	M	N	O	P	Q	R	S	T	U	V	W	X	Y	Z
Lowercase Latin alphabet	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z

The use of the letters I and V for both consonants and vowels proved inconvenient as the Latin alphabet was adapted to Germanic and Romance languages. W originated as a doubled V (VV) used to represent the Voiced labial–velar approximant /w/ found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letter wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩, which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a rounded u; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minuscule v was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-final swash form, j, came to be used for the consonant, with the un-swashed form restricted to vowel use. Such conventions were erratic for centuries. J was introduced into English for the consonant in the 17th century (it had been rare as a vowel), but it was not universally considered a distinct letter in the alphabetic order until the 19th century.

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and

), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

Spread

The Latin alphabet spread, along with Latin, from the Italian Peninsula to the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea with the expansion of the Roman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, the Levant, and Egypt, continued to use Greek as a lingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the western Romance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.

Middle Ages

With the spread of

.

The Latin script also came into use for writing the

Since the 16th century

As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in

Chinese script

.

Through

Dutch

alphabets.

It is used for many

]

Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the

Chinese characters

. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule.

Since the 19th century

In the late 19th century, the

Romance languages

.

Since 20th century

In 1928, as part of

Uniform Turkic alphabet

in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, three of the newly independent Turkic-speaking republics, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, as well as Romanian-speaking Moldova, officially adopted Latin alphabets for their languages. Kyrgyzstan, Iranian-speaking Tajikistan, and the breakaway region of Transnistria kept the Cyrillic alphabet, chiefly due to their close ties with Russia.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority of

-speakers.

In 1957, the People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from Sawndip, a writing system based on Chinese, to a Latin script alphabet that used a mixture of Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters to represent both the phonemes and tones of the Zhuang language, without the use of diacritics. In 1982 this was further standardised to use only Latin script letters.

With the collapse of the Derg and subsequent end of decades of Amharic assimilation in 1991, various ethnic groups in Ethiopia dropped the Geʽez script, which was deemed unsuitable for languages outside of the Semitic branch.^[7] In the following years the Kafa,^[8] Oromo,^[9] Sidama,^[10] Somali,^[10] and Wolaitta^[10] languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on whether to follow suit for the Hadiyya and Kambaata languages.^[11]

21st century

On 15 September 1999 the authorities of Tatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011.^[12] A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory.^[13]

In 2015, the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace the Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet as the official writing system for the Kazakh language by 2025.^[14] There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in Ukraine,^[15] Kyrgyzstan,^[16][17] and Mongolia.^[18] Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of switching to Latin.^[19]

In October 2019, the organization National Representational Organization for Inuit in Canada (ITK) announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for the Inuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in the Greenlandic language.^[20]

On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for the Uzbek language by 2023. Plans to switch to Latin originally began in 1993 but subsequently stalled and Cyrillic remained in widespread use.^[21][22]

At present the Crimean Tatar language uses both Cyrillic and Latin. The use of Latin was originally approved by Crimean Tatar representatives after the Soviet Union's collapse^[23] but was never implemented by the regional government. After Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 the Latin script was dropped entirely. Nevertheless, Crimean Tatars outside of Crimea continue to use Latin and on 22 October 2021 the government of Ukraine approved a proposal endorsed by the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the Crimean Tatar language to Latin by 2025.^[24]

In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet.^[25]

International standards

By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and

) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage.

As the United States held a preeminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as

Unicode Latin

), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

National standards

The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and sequences of letters and diacritic signs to allow the correct representation of names and to simplify data exchange in Europe. This specification supports all official languages of European Union and European Free Trade Association countries (thus also the Greek and Cyrillic scripts), plus the German minority languages.^{[clarification needed]} To allow the transliteration of names in other writing systems to the Latin script according to the relevant ISO standards all necessary combinations of base letters and diacritic signs are provided.^[26] Efforts are being made to further develop it into a European CEN standard.^[27]

As used by various languages

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing

or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.

Letters

Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the

.

Some West, Central and

.

Dotted and dotless I — ⟨İ i⟩ and ⟨I ı⟩ — are two forms of the letter I used by the Turkish, Azerbaijani, and Kazakh alphabets.^[28] The Azerbaijani language also has ⟨Ə ə⟩, which represents the near-open front unrounded vowel.

Multigraphs

A

.

A

of some languages, digraphs and trigraphs are regarded as independent letters of the alphabet in their own right. The capitalization of digraphs and trigraphs is language-dependent, as only the first letter may be capitalized, or all component letters simultaneously (even for words written in title case, where letters after the digraph or trigraph are left in lowercase).

Ligatures

Main article:

Ligature (typography)

A

ʒ

⟩ or ⟨s⟩, called "sharp S" or "eszett").

Diacritics

A diacritic, in some cases also called an accent, is a small symbol that can appear above or below a letter, or in some other position, such as the

) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent.

English is the only major modern European language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary^{[note 1]}. Historically, in formal writing, a diaeresis was sometimes used to indicate the start of a new syllable within a sequence of letters that could otherwise be misinterpreted as being a single vowel (e.g., "coöperative", "reëlect"), but modern writing styles either omit such marks or use a hyphen to indicate a syllable break (e.g. "co-operative", "re-elect"). ^{[note 2][29]}

Collation

Some modified letters, such as the symbols ⟨å⟩, ⟨ä⟩, and ⟨ö⟩, may be regarded as new individual letters in themselves, and assigned a specific place in the alphabet for collation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done in Swedish. In other cases, such as with ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ in German, this is not done; letter-diacritic combinations being identified with their base letter. The same applies to digraphs and trigraphs. Different diacritics may be treated differently in collation within a single language. For example, in Spanish, the character ⟨ñ⟩ is considered a letter, and sorted between ⟨n⟩ and ⟨o⟩ in dictionaries, but the accented vowels ⟨á⟩, ⟨é⟩, ⟨í⟩, ⟨ó⟩, ⟨ú⟩, ⟨ü⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩.

Capitalization

The languages that use the Latin script today generally use

 'All of the Sisters of the old City had seen the Birds'.

Romanization

Words from languages natively written with other scripts, such as Arabic or Chinese, are usually transliterated or transcribed when embedded in Latin-script text or in multilingual international communication, a process termed romanization.

Whilst the romanization of such languages is used mostly at unofficial levels, it has been especially prominent in computer messaging where only the limited seven-bit ASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction of Unicode, romanization is now becoming less necessary. Keyboards used to enter such text may still restrict users to romanized text, as only ASCII or Latin-alphabet characters may be available.

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)
• European Latin Unicode subset (DIN 91379)
• H with left hook
• Latin letters used in mathematics
• Latin omega

Notes

References

Citations

Sources

• Haarmann, Harald (2004). Geschichte der Schrift [History of Writing] (in German) (2nd ed.). München: C. H. Beck.
  ISBN 978-3-406-47998-4
  .

Further reading

• Boyle, Leonard E. 1976. "Optimist and recensionist: 'Common errors' or 'common variations.'" In Latin script and letters A.D. 400–900: Festschrift presented to Ludwig Bieler on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Edited by John J. O'Meara and Bernd Naumann, 264–74. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.
• Morison, Stanley. 1972. Politics and script: Aspects of authority and freedom in the development of Graeco-Latin script from the sixth century B.C. to the twentieth century A.D. Oxford: Clarendon.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Latin alphabet.

Library resources about
Latin script

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• Online books
• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• Unicode collation chart—Latin letters sorted by shape
• Diacritics Project – All you need to design a font with correct accents