Roman alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called Roman alphabet, is the alphabet used by the Romans for the Latin language. The Latin alphabet is derived from, and very similar to, the Greek alphabet. With some modifications, it is the alphabet currently used for a great number of languages around the World. It is used by some international languages such as English, Spanish, German, French, as well as all the other Romance languages, all the other Germanic languages, some Slavic languages, Turkish, Albanian, Hungarian, Finnish, Indonesian, Malay, and Vietnamese. Since the 19th century, it has been used by a lot of languages of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas that have been codified under western European influence.

The most typical variant of the Latin alphabet is now the English alphabet, which is similar to that of many other languages, with the following twenty-six letters in the following order: 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 classical Latin language used only the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, V, X, Y, and Z. Many languages have added letters like J, U, W, Ð, Þ for additional sounds, and some languages have adopted certain digraphs as letters (such as Spanish CH and LL), and added a wide variety of diacritical marks to many of the letters. Some languages have also abandoned various letters. Thus, the Latin alphabet has now many variants adapted to the needs of different languages.

Some characters of the Latin alphabet (C, D, I, L, M, V, X) are used in the Roman numeral system, though unlike the Greek numeral system, not all the letters are used as numbers.