Latin script
writing system used to write most Western, Northern and Central European languages / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Latin or Roman script is a writing system used to write many modern-day languages including English. It is the most used writing system in the world today. It is the official script for nearly all the languages of Western Europe and of some Eastern European languages. It is also used by some non-European languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Somali, Swahili and Tagalog. It is an alternative writing system for languages such as Serbian and Hindi.
Latin Roman | |
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Script type | |
Time period | ~700 BC–present |
Direction | left-to-right |
Languages |
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Related scripts | |
Parent systems | Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Child systems | Fraser alphabet (Lisu) Osage script (partially) several phonetic alphabets, such as IPA, which have been used to write languages with no native script (partially) Pollard script (Miao) (partially) Caroline Island script (Woleaian) (indirectly) Cherokee syllabary (indirectly, partially) Yugtun script |
Sister systems | Cyrillic Armenian Georgian Coptic Runic/Futhark |
ISO 15924 | |
ISO 15924 | Latn (215), Latin |
Unicode | |
Unicode alias | Latin |
Unicode range | See 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 alphabet is a writing system which evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet. It was the Etruscans who first developed it after borrowing the Greek alphabet, and the Romans developed it further. The sounds of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained and several writing styles ('hands') developed. Two such styles were combined into one script with upper and lower case letters ('capitals' and 'small letters'). Modern capital letters differ only slightly from their Roman counterparts. There are few regional variations.