Latin script

• 1. The World's Default Alphabet

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  In July 2020, 2.6 billion people, about 36 percent of the world's population, wrote using the same set of letters. Those letters trace back to a single ancient Greek city, Cumae, in the region the Romans called Magna Graecia. This is the Latin script, also known as the Roman script. The 26 most widespread of its letters are the same ones found in the English alphabet. Yet the path from a Greek colony to a global default ran through Etruscan scribes, Roman conquest, Catholic missionaries, Cold War committees, and parliaments still voting on it today. Why did so many peoples abandon their own writing systems to adopt these shapes? Who altered the letters along the way, and which ones did they invent? And why are governments in the 21st century still arguing over whether to switch?

• 2. Three Peoples, One Alphabet

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  The Greek alphabet used at Cumae did not pass to Rome unchanged. The Etruscans altered it first, and then the Ancient Romans altered the Etruscan version in turn. Some of the capital letters used today are Greek in origin, a fossil of that older borrowing. From this layered inheritance came the classical Latin alphabet, the parent of every Latin-script alphabet that followed. Those descendant alphabets differ from the classical original and from each other in their graphemes, their collation, and their phonetic values. The script carries two names for two memories. Latin or Roman both point to ancient Rome, while in the work of converting other scripts the term romanization appears, spelled romanisation in British English. Unicode and the International Organization for Standardization both settle on the single word Latin. The same Roman origin gave the world its numerals, the Roman numeral system, even though the figures 1, 2, 3 that people write today belong to the Hindu-Arabic system rendered in Latin script characters.

• 3. Letters That Split In Two

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  I and V once did double duty, each serving as both a consonant and a vowel, and that proved inconvenient as the alphabet stretched to fit Germanic and Romance languages. W began life as a doubled V, written VV, to capture a sound found in Old English as early as the 7th century. It entered common use in the later 11th century, pushing out the older letter wynn. The vowel U was carved out of V in the Romance languages, where a rounded minuscule u produced a rounded capital U in the 16th century, while a new pointed v took over the consonant. The letter J emerged from a word-final swash form of I, with the plain form kept for the vowel. These conventions stayed erratic for centuries. J entered English for the consonant in the 17th century, but was not universally treated as a distinct letter in alphabetical order until the 19th century. Old English itself had borrowed letters now lost to it, wynn, thorn, and eth, while eth and thorn still live in the modern Icelandic alphabet.

• 4. Carried By Faith And Empire

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  Latin the language and Latin the alphabet spread together out of the Italian Peninsula, following the Roman Empire to the lands around the Mediterranean. The Empire's eastern half kept Greek as its lingua franca across Greece, Türkiye, the Levant, and Egypt, but the west spoke Latin, and as the western Romance languages grew out of it they kept adapting its letters. The Middle Ages turned the script's spread into a religious story. As Western Christianity advanced, the Latin alphabet reached the Celtic-speaking peoples of Northern Europe, displacing the Ogham alphabet, and the Germanic speakers, displacing earlier Runic alphabets. It reached Baltic-language speakers and Uralic speakers too, most notably Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Religion drew the dividing line of Europe. West Slavic and several South Slavic languages took the Latin script as their peoples adopted Roman Catholicism, while East Slavic speakers took Cyrillic along with Orthodox Christianity. The Serbian language still straddles the divide, using both scripts under the Law on Official Use of the Language and Alphabet, with Cyrillic dominating official communication and Latin used elsewhere.

• 5. The Colonial Centuries

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  As late as 1500, the Latin script reached little further than Western, Northern, and Central Europe. Orthodox Christian Slavs across Eastern and South-eastern Europe wrote in Cyrillic, Greek speakers used the Greek alphabet around the eastern Mediterranean, and the Arabic script ran through Islam from Arabs to Iranians, Indonesians, Malays, and Turkic peoples. Most of the rest of Asia used Brahmic scripts or the Chinese script. European colonization broke those boundaries open. The Latin script crossed into the Americas, Oceania, parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, arriving in forms shaped by the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, German, and Dutch alphabets. Missionaries were often the agents of change. Under Portuguese missionary influence a Latin alphabet was devised for Vietnamese, which had used Chinese characters, and the Latin-based alphabet replaced those characters in administration in the 19th century under French rule. Portuguese and other European missionaries who reached Goa on India's west coast in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries introduced Roman script for Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language. The same letters even supplied the forms, though not the sounds, for the Cherokee syllabary developed by Sequoyah.

• 6. A Century Of Switching

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  In 1928, as part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's reforms, the new Republic of Türkiye adopted a Latin alphabet for Turkish, replacing a modified Arabic alphabet. The 1930s saw most peoples of the former USSR take up a Latin-based script, the Unified Turkic Alphabet, starting with Turkic speakers such as the Azeri, Yakuts, Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz before spreading further. The reversal came fast. In the 1940s all those scripts were replaced by Cyrillic, though some peoples escaped Cyrillization, among them the Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Germans, Poles, Finns, Georgians, and Armenians. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 swung the pendulum back, as Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Romanian-speaking Moldova officially adopted Latin alphabets, while Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Transnistria kept Cyrillic through their close ties with Russia. Other changes came without empires. In the 1930s and 1940s most Kurds swapped the Arabic script for two Latin alphabets. In 1957 the People's Republic of China reformed the Zhuang language away from Sawndip toward a Latin script mixing Latin, Cyrillic, and IPA letters, standardized in 1982 to use only Latin letters. The earlier return of the Romanians to the Latin alphabet in the late 19th century, dropping the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, had set the pattern.

• 7. Still Voting On Letters

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  On the 15th of September 1999, the authorities of Tatarstan, Russia, passed a law to make Latin a co-official script alongside Cyrillic for the Tatar language by 2011, only for the Russian government to overrule it a year later and ban Latinization on its territory. The arguments have not stopped. In 2015 the government of Kazakhstan announced that a Kazakh Latin alphabet would replace Cyrillic as the official writing system by 2025, with similar talks underway in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, and Mongolia, though Mongolia chose to revive the Mongolian script instead. In October 2019, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami announced a unified Latin-based writing system for the Inuit languages in Canada, modeled on the one used in Greenlandic. On the 12th of February 2021, Uzbekistan announced it would finish moving from Cyrillic to Latin for Uzbek by 2023, completing a transition that first began in 1993 before stalling. The Crimean Tatar language tells the sharpest version of the story. Latin use was approved there after the Soviet collapse but never implemented, then dropped entirely after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014. On the 22nd of October 2021, the government of Ukraine approved a proposal from the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People to switch the language to Latin by 2025.

• 8. Encoding The Alphabet

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  By the 1960s the computer and telecommunications industries of the First World realized they needed a non-proprietary way to encode characters. The International Organization for Standardization captured the Latin alphabet in its ISO/IEC 646 standard, basing the encapsulation on popular usage to win acceptance. Because the United States led both industries in that decade, the standard built on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII. ASCII carried the 26 times 2 uppercase and lowercase letters of the English alphabet, and later ISO standards such as ISO/IEC 10646, known as Unicode Latin, kept defining those same letters as the basic Latin alphabet, adding extensions for other languages. National standards refined the idea further. The DIN standard DIN 91379 specifies a subset of Unicode letters, special characters, and letter-diacritic sequences so that names are represented correctly and data exchange across Europe is simpler. It supports every official language of European Union and European Free Trade Association countries, even the Greek and Cyrillic scripts, plus the German minority languages, and provides the combinations needed to transliterate names from other writing systems under the relevant ISO standards. Efforts are underway to develop it into a European CEN standard.