Latin Roman |
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Type | |
Languages |
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Time period
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~700 BC–present |
Parent systems
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|
Child systems
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indirectly, the Cherokee syllabary and Yugtun script |
Sister systems
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Cyrillic Armenian Georgian Coptic Runic/Futhark |
Direction | Left-to-right |
ISO 15924 | Latn, 215 |
Unicode alias
|
Latin |
See Latin characters in Unicode | |
Latin or Roman script is a set of graphic signs (script) based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, which is derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet, used by the Etruscans.
Several Latin-script alphabets exist which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
The Latin script is the basis of the International Phonetic Alphabet and the 26 most widespread letters are the letters contained in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.
Latin script is the basis for the largest number of alphabets of any writing system and is the most widely adopted writing system in the world (commonly used by about 70% of the world's population). Latin script is used as the standard method of writing in most Western and Central European languages, as well as in many languages in other parts of the world.
The script is either called Roman script or Latin script, in reference to its origin in ancient Rome. In the context of transliteration, the term "romanization" or "romanisation" is often found.Unicode uses the term "Latin" as does the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
The numeral system is called the Roman numeral system; and the collection of the elements, Roman numerals. The numbers 1,2,3 ... are Latin/Roman script numbers for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.