Roman alphabet

The Latin alphabet is the original version of the Roman alphabet, as used by the Romans for the Latin language. It is derived from, and very similar to, the Greek alphabet. The Romans adopted the alphabet from the Etruscans, who had adopted it from the Greeks who had colonized Sicily and the southern Italian peninsula. The "West Greek" alphabet was slightly different from the East Greek alphabet which evolved into the modern Greek alphabet, which caused some of the letterform changes. The Etruscans had no sound for 'g' (voiced velar stop) in their language, but three different 'k' (voiceless velar stop) sounds, and so adopted the Greek gamma to represent a 'k' sound; the shape of the West Greek gamma was similar to Latin C, and eventually the letter morphed into the modern 'C'.

With some modifications, and usually called the Roman alphabet, 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 many 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.