The
Latin alphabet, also called the
Roman alphabet, is the most widely used
alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the
Greek alphabet called the
Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the
ancient Romans to write the
Latin language.
During the Middle Ages, it was adapted to the Romance languages, the direct descendants of Latin, as well as to the Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and some Slavic languages, and finally to most of the languages of Europe.
With the age of colonialism and Christian proselytism, the Latin alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to Amerindian, Indigenous Australian, Austronesian, East Asian, and African languages. More recently, western linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when transcribing or devising written standards for non-European languages, such as the African reference alphabet.
In modern usage, the term Latin alphabet is used for any straightforward derivation of the alphabet first used to write Latin. These variants may discard letters from the classical Roman script (like the Rotokas alphabet) or add new letters to it (like the Danish and Norwegian alphabet). Letter shapes have changed over the centuries, including the creation of entirely new lower case forms.
