TheLatin script, also known as theRoman script, is awriting system based on the letters of theclassical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of theGreek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city ofCumae inMagna Graecia. The Greek alphabet was altered by theEtruscans, and subsequently their alphabet was altered by theAncient Romans. SeveralLatin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of anywriting system[1] and is themost widely adopted 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.
The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the elements is known as theRoman numerals. The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for theHindu–Arabic numeral system.
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 doubledV (VV) used to represent the Voiced labial–velar approximant/w/ found inOld English as early as the 7th century. It came into common use in the later 11th century, replacing the letterwynn⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩, which had been used for the same sound. In the Romance languages, the minuscule form of V was a roundedu; from this was derived a rounded capital U for the vowel in the 16th century, while a new, pointed minusculev was derived from V for the consonant. In the case of I, a word-finalswash form,j, came to be used for the consonant, with the unswashed 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 andtelecommunications industries in theFirst World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. TheInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) 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 publishedAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known asASCII, which included in thecharacter set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of theEnglish alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for exampleISO/IEC 10646 (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.
Latin script is the sole official (orde facto official) national script.
Latin script is a co-official script at the national level.
Latin script is not officially used.
Latin-script alphabets are sometimes extensively used in areas coloured grey due to the use of unofficial second languages, such as French in Morocco and English in Egypt, and to Latin transliteration of the official script, such aspinyin in China.
The Latin alphabet spread, along withLatin, from theItalian Peninsula to the lands surrounding theMediterranean Sea with the expansion of theRoman Empire. The eastern half of the Empire, including Greece, Turkey, theLevant, and Egypt, continued to useGreek as alingua franca, but Latin was widely spoken in the western half, and as the westernRomance languages evolved out of Latin, they continued to use and adapt the Latin alphabet.
Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for theVietnamese language, which had previously usedChinese characters. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French rule.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the majority ofKurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the officialKurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout the region by the majority ofKurdish-speakers.
In 1957, thePeople's Republic of China introduced a script reform to theZhuang language, changing its orthography fromSawndip, 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.
On 15 September 1999 the authorities ofTatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make the Latin script a co-official writing system alongside Cyrillic for theTatar language by 2011.[12] A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned Latinization on its territory.[13]
In October 2019,Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the national organization forInuit in Canada announced that they will introduce a unified writing system for theInuit languages in the country. The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet and is modeled after the one used in theGreenlandic language.[20]
On 12 February 2021 the government of Uzbekistan announced it will finalize the transition from Cyrillic to Latin for theUzbek 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 theCrimean 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'sannexation 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 theMejlis 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]
By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer andtelecommunications industries in theFirst World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. TheInternational Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin alphabet in their (ISO/IEC 646) 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 publishedAmerican Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known asASCII, which included in thecharacter set the 26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of theEnglish alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for exampleISO/IEC 10646 (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.
The DIN standardDIN 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 ofEuropean Union andEuropean Free Trade Association countries (thus also the Greek andCyrillic scripts), plus theGerman 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 EuropeanCEN standard.[27]
In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representingphonemes not found in languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore created, be it by addingdiacritics to existingletters, by joining multiple letters together to makeligatures, by creating completely new forms, or by assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters. These new forms are given a place in the alphabet by defining analphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.
Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are theRunic letterswynn⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ andthorn⟨Þ þ⟩, and the lettereth⟨Ð/ð⟩, which were added to the alphabet ofOld English. Another Irish letter, theinsularg, developed intoyogh⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩, used inMiddle English. Wynn was later replaced with the new letter⟨w⟩, eth and thorn with⟨th⟩, and yogh with⟨gh⟩. Although the four are no longer part of the English or Irish alphabets, eth and thorn are still used in the modernIcelandic alphabet, while eth is also used by theFaroese alphabet.
Some West, Central andSouthern African languages use a few additional letters that have sound values similar to those of their equivalents in the IPA. For example,Adangme uses the letters⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩ and⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩, andGa uses⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩,⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩.Hausa uses⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩ and⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ forimplosives, and⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for anejective.Africanists have standardized these into theAfrican reference alphabet.
Adigraph is a pair of letters used to write one sound or a combination of sounds that does not correspond to the written letters in sequence. Examples are⟨ch⟩,⟨ng⟩,⟨rh⟩,⟨sh⟩,⟨ph⟩,⟨th⟩ in English, and⟨ij⟩,⟨ee⟩,⟨ch⟩ and⟨ei⟩ in Dutch. In Dutch the⟨ij⟩ is capitalized as⟨IJ⟩ or theligature⟨IJ⟩, but never as⟨Ij⟩, and it often takes the appearance of a ligature⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter⟨ÿ⟩ inhandwriting.
Atrigraph is made up of three letters, like theGerman⟨sch⟩, theBreton⟨c'h⟩ or theMilanese⟨oeu⟩. In theorthographies 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).
Aligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a newglyph or character. Examples are⟨Æ æ⟩ (from⟨AE⟩, calledash),⟨Œ œ⟩ (from⟨OE⟩, sometimes calledoethel oreðel), theabbreviation⟨&⟩ (fromLatin:et,lit. 'and', calledampersand), and⟨ẞß⟩ (from⟨ſʒ⟩ or⟨ſs⟩, thearchaic medial form of⟨s⟩, followed by an⟨ʒ⟩ or⟨s⟩, calledsharp S oreszett).
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 theumlaut sign used in the German characters⟨ä⟩,⟨ö⟩,⟨ü⟩ or the Romanian charactersă,â,î,ș,ț. Its main function is to change the phonetic value of the letter to which it is added, but it may also modify the pronunciation of a whole syllable or word, indicate the start of a new syllable, or distinguish betweenhomographs such as theDutch wordseen (pronounced[ən]) meaning "a" or "an", andéén, (pronounced[e:n]) meaning "one". As with the pronunciation of letters, the effect of diacritics is language-dependent.
English is the only major modernEuropean language that requires no diacritics for its native vocabulary[note 1]. Historically, in formal writing, adiaeresis 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]
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 forcollation purposes, separate from that of the letter on which they are based, as is done inSwedish. 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⟩.
The languages that use the Latin script today generally usecapital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences andproper nouns. The rules forcapitalization have changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for capitalization.Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper nouns capitalized; whereasModern English of the 18th century had frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that ModernGerman is written today, e.g.German:Alle Schwestern der alten Stadt hatten die Vögel gesehen,lit. 'All of the Sisters of the old City had seen the Birds'.
Words from languages natively written with otherscripts, such asArabic orChinese, are usuallytransliterated ortranscribed when embedded in Latin-script text or inmultilingual international communication, a process termedromanization.
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-bitASCII code is available on older systems. However, with the introduction ofUnicode, 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.
^In formal English writing, however, diacritics are often preserved on many loanwords, such as "café", "naïve", "façade", "jalapeño" or the German prefix "über-".
^Andrews, Ernest (2018).Language Planning in the Post-Communist Era: The Struggles for Language Control in the New Order in Eastern Europe, Eurasia and China. Springer. p. 132.ISBN978-3-319-70926-0.
^Faller, Helen (2011).Nation, Language, Islam: Tatarstan's Sovereignty Movement. Central European University Press. p. 131.ISBN978-963-9776-84-5.
Boyle, Leonard E. 1976. "Optimist and recensionist: 'Common errors' or 'common variations.'" InLatin 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.
