The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is an alphabet originally developed to write Latin in ancient Italy. Its descendants form the Latin script, a writing system used by many languages worldwide. The term can refer narrowly to the ancient Roman letter inventory or broadly to modern alphabets derived from it. Its familiar basic form contains 26 letters, but individual languages may omit some, add others, or use modified letters. The Latin alphabet is therefore not identical to the alphabet of any single modern language. (en.wikipedia.org)
Origins and the classical alphabet
The Romans adapted their letters from the Etruscan alphabet, which descended from a western variety of the Greek alphabet. Greek writing, in turn, developed from the Phoenician alphabet. This transmission involved changes in letter shapes and sound values rather than simple copying: each community adapted the inherited symbols to its own language. (en.wikipedia.org)
The early Roman inventory changed over time. Initially, C could represent both /k/ and /g/. G was subsequently created by modifying C, distinguishing the voiced consonant from its voiceless counterpart. Z disappeared from its original position, which G occupied, and was later reintroduced at the alphabet’s end. Y was also added for writing words borrowed from Greek. The conventional classical inventory contained 23 letters: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z. (en.wikipedia.org)
Classical Latin did not distinguish J from I or U from V as separate letters, and it had no W. The later 26-letter inventory resulted from separating J and U from their predecessors and adding W, developed from doubled forms of U or V. These distinctions emerged gradually rather than through a single alphabet reform. (en.wikipedia.org)
Letterforms and case
Ancient Roman writing included formal capitals and more rapidly written cursive hands. The familiar pairing of uppercase and lowercase letters developed through subsequent manuscript traditions; lowercase letters were not part of the classical alphabet as a separate, systematically paired inventory. (en.wikipedia.org)
During the Middle Ages, Carolingian minuscule became an influential book hand. Its rounded, clearly differentiated letters were rediscovered by Italian humanists during the Renaissance. Humanist handwriting and early printing helped establish forms ancestral to modern lowercase type. Modern Latin lettering thus combines traditions of Roman capitals with forms developed through medieval and Renaissance writing. (gallica.bnf.fr)
Letter identity is distinct from visual design. For example, ordinary text may use single-storey or double-storey forms of a and g without changing the underlying letters. Such differences belong to typography, although specialized phonetic notation can assign different functions to otherwise similar shapes. (unicode.org)
Modern structure and language-specific adaptations
Modern Latin-script text normally runs from left to right, with spaces separating words. Its basic uppercase sequence is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ, paired with abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. These letters provide a shared core, not a complete inventory for every language using the script. (unicode.org)
Each language’s orthography determines which letters are recognized and how they function. The English language uses the basic 26-letter inventory, whereas other alphabets employ additional characters or smaller inventories. Adaptations include diacritics, combinations of letters, modified shapes, and newly created characters. A marked letter may count as an independent alphabetic letter in one language but as a variant of a base letter in another. (en.wikipedia.org)
A digraph combines two letters to represent a linguistic unit, often a single sound. More generally, alphabets using Latin letters differ in their graphemes, sound values, and alphabetic ordering. The script supplies symbols; a language’s spelling conventions determine their relationship to its phonology. Consequently, knowing the letters alone does not establish how an unfamiliar language is pronounced. (unicode.org)
Expansion and phonetic representation
The expansion of the Roman Empire carried Latin writing beyond Italy. In western Europe, languages descended from Latin continued to use and adapt its alphabet. During the medieval period, it also became established in languages from other linguistic families, including Germanic, Celtic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages. Its later distribution extended across much of the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania. (en.wikipedia.org)
Latin letters also represent languages normally written in other scripts. Romanization denotes such representation in Latin characters; it does not necessarily entail replacing the original writing system. Pinyin, for example, provides a Latin-based representation of Mandarin Chinese. Its marked vowels include conventions for indicating tones. (en.wikipedia.org)
The International Phonetic Alphabet extends Latin-based notation with additional letters and marks to represent speech sounds across languages. It differs from ordinary spelling systems because its symbols serve phonetic description rather than the conventional orthography of one language. (unicode.org)
Digital encoding
Unicode encodes the basic Latin letter pairs and numerous extensions used in different orthographies and transcription systems. The basic letters occupy the ranges U+0041–U+005A for uppercase and U+0061–U+007A for lowercase. Additional Latin letters appear in other blocks, while combining marks can be attached to base characters. (unicode.org)
An accented letter may have both a precomposed encoding and a canonically equivalent sequence of a base letter followed by a combining mark. Unicode normalization places equivalent representations into consistent forms. This distinguishes a written letter’s identity from the number of code points used to encode it and enables equivalent text sequences to receive consistent digital representations. (unicode.org)