Latin alphabet

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The Latin alphabet is the set of letters used by the ancient Romans to write Classical Latin, later augmented with lower-case letters to write Medieval Latin. Its expansion into the core 26-letter modern inventory (standardised today as the ISO basic Latin alphabet, which is utilized by Modern Latin), was motivated by vernacular languages. This slightly expanded inventory resulted from the addition of ⟨W⟩ in the Middle Ages and the separation of ⟨J⟩ from ⟨I⟩ and ⟨U⟩ from ⟨V⟩ in the Early Modern era. This set of letters is the basis of the Latin script, the most widely used writing system in the world, but often with diacritics or additional letters. The Latin script is used to write over 3,000 languages, spoken by about 70% of the global population, principally in western and central Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas and Oceania.

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