Latin script

Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on
the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek Latin

version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, Roman
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.

Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system[1] and
is the
most widely adopted writing system in the world (commonly used by about 70
percent of the world's population). Latin script is used as the standard method of writing
for most Western and Central, and some Eastern, European languages as well as many
languages in other parts of the world. Script type Alphabet (impure) and
Bicameral
Time c. 700 BC – present
Contents period

Name Direction left-to-right 

History Languages Most Western European

languages, including Latin ·
Old Italic alphabet
Many Turkic, Finno-Ugric
Archaic Latin alphabet and Eskimo–Aleut
Classical Latin alphabet languages · Basque ·
Medieval and later developments Polynesian languages ·
ISO basic Latin alphabet Some African,
Austronesian, and
Spread Austroasiatic languages
Middle Ages
Since the 16th century Official script in:
Since 19th century 132 sovereign states
Since 20th century
21st century  Albania

International standards  Andorra

As used by various languages  Angola

Letters
 Antigua and Barbuda
Multigraphs
Ligatures  Argentina
Diacritics  Australia
Collation
Capitalization  Austria

Romanization  Azerbaijan
See also  Bahamas
Notes  Barbados
References
 Belgium
Citations
Sources  Belize
Further reading  Benin
External links  Bolivia

 Botswana
Name  Brazil

 Burkina Faso
The script is either called Latin script or Roman script, in reference to its origin in  Burundi
ancient Rome. 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  Cameroon
International Organization for Standardization (ISO).[5]  Canada
The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system, and the collection of the  Cape Verde
elements is known as the Roman numerals. The numbers 1, 2, 3 ... are Latin/Roman
script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.  Central African
Republic
History  Chile

 Colombia
Old Italic alphabet  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

 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:

13 sovereign states

 Bosnia and
Herzegovina

 Brunei

 Chad

 Comoros

 Djibouti

 Eritrea

 India

 Kazakhstan

 Montenegro

 Pakistan

 Singapore[a]

 Somalia

 Sudan

 European Union
 United Nations
Related scripts
Parent Egyptian hieroglyphs
systems
Proto-Sinaitic script

Phoenician alphabet

Greek alphabet

Old Italic script

Latin

Child Fraser alphabet (Lisu)

systems Osage script

Latin alphabet

(partially) several phonetic

alphabets, such as IPA,
which have been used to
write languages with no
native script

Deseret alphabet

(partially) Pollard script

(Miao)

(partially) Caroline Island

script (Woleaian)

(indirectly) Cherokee
syllabary

(indirectly, partially) Yugtun

script
Cyrillic script
 Sister Glagolitic script

systems Armenian alphabet

Georgian script

Coptic alphabet

Runes
ISO 15924
ISO 15924 Latn, 215 , ​Latin
Unicode
Unicode Latin
alias
Unicode See Latin characters in
range Unicode

Old Italic alphabet

Letters 𐌀 𐌁 𐌂 𐌃 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌈 𐌉 𐌊 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌎 𐌏 𐌐 𐌑 𐌒 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌗 𐌘 𐌙 𐌚
Transliteration A B C D E V Z H Θ I K L M N Ξ O P Ś Q R S T Y X Φ Ψ F

Archaic Latin alphabet

Archaic Latin alphabet

As Old Italic 𐌀 𐌁 𐌂 𐌃 𐌄 𐌅 𐌆 𐌇 𐌉 𐌊 𐌋 𐌌 𐌍 𐌏 𐌐 𐌒 𐌓 𐌔 𐌕 𐌖 𐌗
As Latin A B C D E F Z H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X

The letter ⟨C⟩ was the western form of the Greek gamma, but it was used for the sounds /ɡ/ and /k/ alike, possibly under the
influence of Etruscan, which might have lacked any voiced plosives. Later, probably during the 3rd century BC, the letter ⟨Z⟩ –
unneeded to write Latin properly – was replaced with the new letter ⟨G⟩, a ⟨C⟩ modified with a small horizontal stroke, which took
its place in the alphabet. From then on, ⟨G⟩ represented the voiced plosive /ɡ/, while ⟨C⟩ was generally reserved for the voiceless
plosive /k/. The letter ⟨K⟩ was used only rarely, in a small number of words such as Kalendae, often interchangeably with ⟨C⟩.

Classical Latin alphabet

After the Roman conquest of Greece in the 1st century BC, Latin adopted the Greek letters ⟨Y⟩ and ⟨Z⟩ (or readopted, in the latter
case) to write Greek loanwords, placing them at the end of the alphabet. An attempt by the emperor Claudius to introduce three
additional letters did not last. Thus it was during the classical Latin period that the Latin alphabet contained 23 letters:

Classical Latin alphabet

Letter A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z
Latin name
á bé cé dé é ef gé há ꟾ ká el em en ó pé qv́ er es té v́ ix ꟾ graeca zéta
(majus)
Latin name ā bē cē dē ē ef gē hā ī kā el em en ō pē qū er es tē ū ix ī Graeca zēta
Latin
pronunciation aː beː keː deː eː ɛf ɡeː haː iː kaː ɛl ɛm ɛn oː peː kuː ɛr ɛs teː uː iks iː ˈɡraeka ˈdzeːta
(IPA)

Medieval and later developments

It was not until the Middle Ages that the letter ⟨W⟩ (originally a ligature of two ⟨V⟩
s) was added to the Latin alphabet, to represent sounds from the Germanic
languages which did not exist in medieval Latin, and only after the Renaissance
did the convention of treating ⟨I⟩ and ⟨U⟩ as vowels, and ⟨J⟩ and ⟨V⟩ as
consonants, become established. Prior to that, the former had been merely
allographs of the latter.

With the fragmentation of political power, the style of writing changed and varied
greatly throughout the Middle Ages, even after the invention of the printing press. De chalcographiae inventione (1541, Mainz) with
Early deviations from the classical forms were the uncial script, a development of the 23 letters. J, U and W are missing.
the Old Roman cursive, and various so-called minuscule scripts that developed
from New Roman cursive, of which the insular script developed by Irish literati &
derivations of this, such as Carolingian minuscule were the most influential,
introducing the lower case forms of the letters, as well as other writing
conventions that have since become standard.

The languages that use the Latin script generally use capital letters to begin
paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns. The rules for capitalization have
changed over time, and different languages have varied in their rules for
capitalization. Old English, for example, was rarely written with even proper Jeton from Nuremberg, c. 1553
nouns capitalized, whereas Modern English writers and printers of the 17th and
18th century frequently capitalized most and sometimes all nouns[6] – e.g. in the
preamble and all of the United States Constitution – a practice still systematically used in Modern German.

ISO basic Latin alphabet

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 telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary
method of encoding characters was needed. The International 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
published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the
26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/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.

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 Western Christianity during the Middle

The distribution of the Latin script. The dark green areas show the
Ages, the Latin alphabet was gradually adopted by the
countries where the Latin script is the sole main script. Light green shows
peoples of Northern Europe who spoke Celtic languages
countries where Latin co-exists with other scripts. Latin-script alphabets are
(displacing the Ogham alphabet) or Germanic languages sometimes extensively used in areas coloured grey due to the use of
(displacing earlier Runic alphabets) or Baltic languages, as unofficial second languages, such as French in Algeria and English in
well as by the speakers of several Uralic languages, most Egypt, and to Latin transliteration of the official script, such as pinyin in
notably Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. China.

The Latin script also came into use for writing the West
Slavic languages and several South Slavic languages, as the
people who spoke them adopted Roman Catholicism. The speakers of East Slavic languages generally adopted Cyrillic along with
Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language uses both scripts, with Cyrillic predominating in official communication and Latin
elsewhere, as determined by the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet.[7]

Since the 16th century

As late as 1500, the Latin script was limited primarily to the languages spoken in Western, Northern, and Central Europe. The
Orthodox Christian Slavs of Eastern and Southeastern Europe mostly used Cyrillic, and the Greek alphabet was in use by Greek-
speakers around the eastern Mediterranean. The Arabic script was widespread within Islam, both among Arabs and non-Arab
nations like the Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used a variety of Brahmic alphabets or
the Chinese script.

Through European colonization the Latin script has spread to the Americas, Oceania, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, in
forms based on the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German and Dutch alphabets.

It is used for many Austronesian languages, including the languages of the Philippines and the Malaysian and Indonesian
languages, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets. Latin letters served as the basis for the forms of the
Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah; however, the sound values are completely different.

Under Portuguese missionary influence, a Latin alphabet was devised for the Vietnamese language, which had previously used
Chinese characters. The Latin-based alphabet replaced the Chinese characters in administration in the 19th century with French
rule.

Since 19th century

In the late 19th century, the Romanians returned to the Latin alphabet, which they had used until the Council of Florence in
1439,[8] primarily because Romanian is a Romance language. The Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and their
Church, increasingly influenced by Russia after the fall of Byzantine Greek Constantinople in 1453 and capture of the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch, had begun promoting the Slavic Cyrillic.

Since 20th century

In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, the new Republic of Turkey adopted a Latin alphabet for the Turkish
language, replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. Most of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars,
Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based 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 Kurds replaced the Arabic script with two Latin alphabets. Although only the official
Kurdish government uses an Arabic alphabet for public documents, the Latin Kurdish alphabet remains widely used throughout
the region by the majority of Kurdish-speakers.

In 1957, the People's Republic of China introduced a script reform to the Zhuang language, changing its orthography from
unregulated and highly inconsistent use of Chinese characters, known as sawndip, 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.[9] In the following years the
Kafa,[10] Oromo,[11] Sidama,[12] Somali,[12] and Wolaitta[12] languages switched to Latin while there is continued debate on
whether to follow suit for the Hadiyya and Kambaata languages.[13]

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.[14] A year later, however, the Russian government overruled the law and banned
Latinization on its territory.[15]
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.[16] There are also talks about switching from the Cyrillic script to Latin in
Ukraine,[17] Kyrgyzstan,[18][19] and Mongolia.[20] Mongolia, however, has since opted to revive the Mongolian script instead of
switching to Latin.[21]

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.[22]

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.[23][24]

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[25] 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.[26]

In July 2020, 2.6 billion people (36% of the world population) use the Latin alphabet.[27]

International standards
By the 1960s, it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary
method of encoding characters was needed. The International 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
published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the
26 × 2 (uppercase and lowercase) letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/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.

As used by various languages

In the course of its use, the Latin alphabet was adapted for use in new languages, sometimes representing phonemes not found in
languages that were already written with the Roman characters. To represent these new sounds, extensions were therefore
created, be it by adding diacritics to existing letters, by joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, 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 an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language.

Letters

Some examples of new letters to the standard Latin alphabet are the Runic letters wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩, and the letter eth
⟨Ð/ð⟩, which were added to the alphabet of Old English. Another Irish letter, the insular g, developed into yogh ⟨Ȝ ȝ⟩, used in
Middle 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 modern Icelandic and Faroese alphabets.

Some West, Central and Southern 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⟩, and Ga uses ⟨Ɛ ɛ⟩, ⟨Ŋ ŋ⟩ and ⟨Ɔ ɔ⟩. Hausa uses ⟨Ɓ ɓ⟩
and ⟨Ɗ ɗ⟩ for implosives, and ⟨Ƙ ƙ⟩ for an ejective. Africanists have standardized these into the African reference alphabet.

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 digraph 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 the ligature ⟨IJ⟩, but never as ⟨Ij⟩, and it often takes the appearance of a ligature ⟨ij⟩ very similar to the letter
⟨ÿ⟩ in handwriting.
A trigraph is made up of three letters, like the German ⟨sch⟩, the Breton ⟨c'h⟩ or the Milanese ⟨oeu⟩. In the orthographies 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

A ligature is a fusion of two or more ordinary letters into a new glyph or character. Examples are ⟨Æ æ⟩ (from ⟨AE⟩, called "ash"),
⟨Œ œ⟩ (from ⟨OE⟩, sometimes called "oethel"), the abbreviation ⟨&⟩ (from Latin: et, lit. 'and', called "ampersand"), and ⟨ẞ ß⟩ (from
⟨ſʒ⟩ or ⟨ſs⟩, the archaic medial form of ⟨s⟩, followed by an ⟨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 umlaut sign used in the German characters ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩ or the Romanian
characters ă, 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, or distinguish between homographs (such as
the Dutch words een (pronounced [ən]) meaning "a" or "an", and één, (pronounced [e:n]) meaning "one"). As with
The letter ⟨a⟩
letters, the value of diacritics is language-dependent.
with an acute
English is the only major modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diacritic
diaeresis may be used in words such as "coöperation").[note 1][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⟩ are not separated from the unaccented vowels ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, ⟨u⟩.

Capitalization

The languages that use the Latin script today generally use capital letters to begin paragraphs and sentences and proper nouns.
The rules for capitalization 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; whereas Modern English of the 18th century had
frequently all nouns capitalized, in the same way that Modern German 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'.

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. Note that 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
List of languages by writing system#Latin script
Western Latin character sets (computing)
Latin letters used in mathematics

Notes
 1. As an example, an article containing a diaeresis in "coöperate" and a cedilla in "façade" as well as a circumflex in the word
"crêpe": Grafton, Anthony (2006-10-23). "Books: The Nutty Professors, The history of academic charisma" (http://www.newyor
ker.com/archive/2006/10/23/061023crbo_books?currentPage=all). The New Yorker.

a. Alongside Chinese and Tamil

References

Citations
1. Haarmann 2004, p. 96.
2. "Search results | BSI Group" (http://www.bsigroup.com/en/DualSearch/?q=romanization). Bsigroup.com. Retrieved
2014-05-12.
3. "Romanisation_systems" (http://www.pcgn.org.uk/Romanisation_systems.htm). Pcgn.org.uk. Retrieved 2014-05-12.
4. "ISO 15924 – Code List in English" (https://www.unicode.org/iso15924/iso15924-en.html). Unicode.org. Retrieved
2013-07-22.
5. "Search – ISO" (http://www.iso.org/iso/home/search.htm?qt=Latin&sort_by=rel&type=simple&published=on). Iso.org.
Retrieved 2014-05-12.
6. Crystal, David (4 August 2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (https://books.google.com/books?id=K
h_RZhvHk0YC&q=%22as+is+done+systematically+in+modern+German%22). Cambridge University Press.
ISBN 9780521530330 – via Google Books.
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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
Unicode collation chart (http://www.unicode.org/charts/collation/)—Latin letters sorted by shape
Diacritics Project – All you need to design a font with correct accents (http://diacritics.typo.cz/)

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