From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Latin-derived alphabet is an alphabetical writing system that uses letters of the original Roman Latin alphabet and extensions. Extending can be done by adding diacritics to existing letters, joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, creating completely new forms, or assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters.

These new forms are often given a place in the alphabet by defining a alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular language. Some extensions, especially letters used with diacritics are not considered separate letters, e.g. French é or German ö are not used in the commonly quoted alphabet sequences.

The Basic modern Latin alphabet is the most well known Latin-derived alphabet. The International Phonetic Alphabet is also Latin-derived.

The tables below summarize and compare some of the alphabets known to the various contributors. In this article, the word "alphabet" is intentionally broadened to include letters with tone marks and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions found in modern and classical literature, without special regard as to whether the modified letters have their own traditional alphabetic place or are interfiled, or whether the letters are in the sequence in the table or elsewhere. Peculiarities of the particular alphabet in question may be noted in footnotes, in referenced Wikipedia articles, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Basic Modern Latin alphabet

The Afrikaans, Basque ^[4], Breton, Catalan ^[6], Czech ^[8], Danish ^[9], Dutch ^[10], English ^[36], Estonian, Filipino ^[11], Finnish, French ^[12], German ^[13], Hungarian ^[15], Interlingua, Kurdish, Modern Latin, Malay, Norwegian ^[9], Pan-European, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak ^[24], Spanish ^[25], Swedish, Võro, Xhosa, and Zulu alphabets include all 26 letters at least in their largest version, according to the references cited here.

The International Phonetic Alphabet also includes all 26 letters in its lowercase form.

The chart above lists a variety of alphabets that do not officially contain all 26 letters of the Modern Latin alphabet. In this list of 54 alphabets, the five letters used by all of them are A, E, N, T, and I (this last letter is used with two distinct variants in Turkic languages, either as dotless or dotted, as indicated in the table above where a confusion is possible between the lowercase and uppercase forms, or which the case conversion must preserve the distinction ; note that Irish traditionally does not write the dot, or tittle, over the small letter i, but the language makes no distinction here if a dot is displayed, so no specific encoding and special case conversion rule is needed like in the Turkic alphabet). The number of alphabets in the list above using the other basic Modern Latin letters is as follows:

Extended Latin alphabet

Some languages have extended the Latin alphabet with ligatures, modified letters, or digraphs. These symbols are listed below. The characters in the following tables may not all render, depending on which operating system and browser version are used, and the presence or absence of Unicode fonts.

All extended Latin letters by type

Additional base letters or ligatures

Letters with overlaying or attached combining diacritics

Letters with detached combining diacritics

All extended Latin letters in collation order

For the order in which the characters are sorted in each alphabet, see Collating sequence.

Letters associated with A-G

Letters associated with H-Q