The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with

ISO/IEC 646 ISO/IEC 646 is a set of ISO/IEC standards, described as ''Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange'' and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. Since its first edition in 1 ...

) for a

Latin-script alphabet A Latin-script alphabet (Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet) is an alphabet that uses letters of the Latin script. The 21-letter archaic Latin alphabet and the 23-letter classical Latin alphabet belong to the oldest of this group. The 26-letter ...

that consists of two sets (

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the Letter (alphabet), letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain lang ...

and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in

international communication International communication (also referred to as the ''study of global communication'' or transnational communication) is the communication practice that occurs across international borders. The need for international communication was due to the ...

. They are the same letters that comprise the current

English alphabet The alphabet for Modern English is a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, each having an upper- and lower-case form. The word ''alphabet'' is a compound of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, '' alpha'' and '' beta''. ...

. Since medieval times, they are also the same letters of the modern

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...

. The order is also important for sorting words into alphabetical order. The two sets contain the following 26 letters each:

History

By the 1960s it became apparent to the

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to Execution (computing), carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as C ...

and telecommunications industries in the

First World The concept of First World originated during the Cold War and comprised countries that were under the influence of the United States and the rest of NATO and opposed the Soviet Union and/or communism during the Cold War. Since the collapse of ...

that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin script in their (

) 7-bit character-encoding standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. The standard was based on the already published ''American Standard Code for Information Interchange'', better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 letters of the

. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 8859 (8-bit character encoding) and ISO/IEC 10646 (

Unicode Latin Over a thousand characters from the Latin script are encoded in the Unicode Standard, grouped in several basic and extended Latin blocks. The extended ranges contain mainly precomposed letters plus diacritics that are equivalently encoded with co ...

), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin script with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.

Terminology

The Unicode block that contains the alphabet is called "

C0 Controls and Basic Latin The Basic Latin or C0 Controls and Basic Latin Unicode block is the first block of the Unicode standard, and the only block which is encoded in one byte in UTF-8. The block contains all the letters and control codes of the ASCII encoding. It ra ...

". Two subheadings exist: * "Uppercase Latin alphabet": the letters start at U+0041 and contain the string LATIN CAPITAL LETTER in their descriptions * "Lowercase Latin alphabet": the letters start at U+0061 and contain the string LATIN SMALL LETTER in their descriptions There are also another two sets in the

Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms In CJK (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) computing, graphic characters are traditionally classed into fullwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 全形; in CJK: 全角) and halfwidth (in Taiwan and Hong Kong: 半形; in CJK: 半角) characters. Unlike ...

block: * Uppercase: the letters start at U+FF21 and contain the string FULLWIDTH LATIN CAPITAL LETTER in their descriptions * Lowercase: the letters start at U+FF41 and contain the string FULLWIDTH LATIN SMALL LETTER in their descriptions

Timeline for encoding standards

* 1865 International Morse Code was standardized at the International Telegraphy Congress in Paris, and was later made the standard by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) * 1950s Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet by ICAO

Timeline for widely used computer codes supporting the alphabet

* 1963: ASCII (7-bit character-encoding standard from the

American Standards Association The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private non-profit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards Standardization or standardisation is the process of implementing and developing techn ...

, which became ANSI in 1969) * 1963/1964: EBCDIC (developed by IBM and supporting the same alphabetic characters as ASCII, but with different code values) * 1965-04-30: Ratified by

ECMA Ecma International () is a nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organizatio ...

as ECMA-6 based on work the ECMA's Technical Committee TC1 had carried out since December 1960. * 1972: ISO 646 ( ISO 7-bit character-encoding standard, using the same alphabetic code values as ASCII, revised in second edition ISO 646:1983 and third edition ISO/IEC 646:1991 as a joint

ISO/IEC ISO/IEC JTC 1, entitled "Information technology", is a joint technical committee (JTC) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Its purpose is to develop, maintain and pr ...

standard) * 1983: ITU-T Rec. T.51 , ISO/IEC 6937 (a multi-byte extension of ASCII) * 1987:

ISO/IEC 8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

:1987 (8-bit character encoding) ** Subsequently, other versions and parts of ISO/IEC 8859 have been published. * Mid-to-late 1980s: Windows-1250, Windows-1252, and other encodings used in

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

(some roughly similar to ISO/IEC 8859-1) * 1990: Unicode 1.0 (developed by the Unicode Consortium), contained in the block "

" using the same alphabetic code values as ASCII and ISO/IEC 646 ** Subsequently, other versions of Unicode have been published and it later became a joint

standard as well, as identified below. * 1993: ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993, ISO/IEC standard for characters in Unicode 1.1 ** Subsequently, other versions of ISO/IEC 10646-1 and one of ISO/IEC 10646-2 have been published. Since 2003, the standards have been published under the name "ISO/IEC 10646" without the separation into two parts. * 1997:

Windows Glyph List 4 Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the ''Pan-European character set'', is a character repertoire on Microsoft operating systems comprising 657 Unicode characters, two of them private use. Its purpose is to provide ...

Representation

In ASCII the letters belong to the printable characters and in Unicode since version 1.0 they belong to the block "

". In both cases, as well as in

, ISO/IEC 8859 and ISO/IEC 10646 they are occupying the positions in hexadecimal notation 41 to 5A for uppercase and 61 to 7A for lowercase. Not case sensitive, all letters have code words in the ICAO spelling alphabet and can be represented with

Morse code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...

Usage

All of the lowercase letters are used in the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

(IPA). In X-SAMPA and SAMPA these letters have the same sound value as in IPA.

Alphabets containing the same set of letters

The list below only includes alphabets that lack: * letters whose diacritical marks make them distinct letters. * multigraphs that constitute distinct letters. *

ligatures Ligature may refer to: * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture used to shut off a blood vessel or other anatomical structure ** Ligature (orthodontic), used in dentistry * Ligature (music), an element of musical notation used especially in the me ...

that are distinct letters Notable omissions due to these rules include Spanish,

Esperanto Esperanto ( or ) is the world's most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, it was intended to be a universal second language for international communi ...

, Filipino and

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) **Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ger ...

. The German alphabet is sometimes considered by tradition to contain only 26 letters (with ä, ö, ü considered variants and ß considered a ligature), but the current German orthographic rules include ä, ö, ü, ß in the alphabet placed after Z; however, this order is normally not used in collation: usually ä, ö, ü are collated as a, o, u (or sometimes as ae, oe, ue), ß as ss. * Constructed languages # English is one of few modern European languages requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some American publishers in words such as "

coöperation Cooperation (written as co-operation in British English) is the process of groups of organisms working or acting together for common, mutual, or some underlying benefit, as opposed to working in competition for selfish benefit. Many animal a ...

"). # Interlingua, a constructed language, never uses diacritics except in unassimilated loanwords. However, they can be removed if they are not used to modify the vowel (e.g. '' cafe'', from french: café). # Malay and Indonesian (based on Malay) are the only languages outside Europe that use all the Latin alphabet and require no diacritics and ligatures. Many of the 700+ languages of Indonesia also use the Indonesian alphabet to write their languages, some—such as Javanese—adding diacritics é and è, and some omitting q, x, and z.

Column numbering

The Roman (Latin) alphabet is commonly used for column numbering in a table or chart. This avoids confusion with row numbers using

Arabic numerals Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...

. For example, a 3-by-3 table would contain Columns A, B, and C, set against Rows 1, 2, and 3. If more columns are needed beyond Z (normally the final letter of the alphabet), the column immediately after Z is AA, followed by AB, and so on (see bijective base-26 system). This can be seen by scrolling far to the right in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc. These are double-digit "letters" for table columns, in the same way that 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. The Greek alphabet has a similar extended form that uses such double-digit letters if necessary, but it is used for chapters of a

fraternity A fraternity (from Latin language, Latin ''wiktionary:frater, frater'': "brother (Christian), brother"; whence, "wiktionary:brotherhood, brotherhood") or fraternal organization is an organization, society, club (organization), club or fraternal ...

as opposed to columns of a table. Such double-digit letters for bullet points are AA, BB, CC, etc., as opposed to the number-like place value system explained above for table columns.

Notes

References

{{character encoding, state=collapsed Latin alphabets