Latin-derived alphabet

A Latin-derived alphabet is an alphabet that uses letters from the Latin script, which comprises the original Roman Latin alphabet and various extensions. Extension can be by adding diacritics to existing letters, joining multiple letters together to make ligatures, creating completely new forms, or assigning a special function to pairs or triplets of letters.

These new characters are often given a place in the alphabet by defining an alphabetical order or collation sequence, which can vary with the particular alphabet. Some, especially those with diacritics, are not considered distinct letters: French é and German ö, for example, are not used in the commonly quoted alphabet sequences.

The ISO basic Latin alphabet is the best-known Latin script based alphabet.^{[citation needed]} The International Phonetic Alphabet is also Latin-derived.

The tables below summarize and compare some of the alphabets. In this article, the word "alphabet" is intentionally broadened to include letters with tone marks and other diacritics used to represent a wide range of orthographic traditions found in modern and classical literature, without special regard as to whether the modified letters have their own traditional alphabetic place or are interfiled, or whether the letters are in the sequence in the table or elsewhere. Peculiarities of the particular alphabet in question may be noted in footnotes, in other Wikipedia articles, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Usage of the ISO basic Latin alphabet in Latin-derived alphabets

The Afrikaans, Basque,^[4] Breton, Catalan,^[6] Czech,^[8] Danish,^[9] Dutch,^[10] English,^[36] Estonian, Filipino,^[11] Finnish, French,^[12] German,^[13], Greenlandic, Hungarian,^[15] Interlingua, Karakalpak, Kurdish, Modern Latin, Malay, Norwegian,^[9] Pan-European, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak,^[24] Spanish,^[25] Swedish, Võro, Xhosa, and Zulu alphabets include all 26 letters, at least in their largest version.

The International Phonetic Alphabet includes all 26 letters in their lowercase forms except g, which is replaced by ɡ.

The chart above lists a variety of alphabets that do not officially contain all 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet. In this list, four letters are used by all of them: A, E, I, and N. For each of the 26 basic ISO Latin alphabet letters, the number of alphabets in the list above using it is as follows:

Note: The I is used in two distinct versions in Turkic languages, dotless (I ı) and dotted (İ i). They are considered different letters, and case conversion must take care to preserve the distinction. Note that Irish traditionally does not write the dot, or tittle, over the small letter i, but the language makes no distinction here if a dot is displayed, so no specific encoding and special case conversion rule is needed like for Turkic alphabets.

Additional letter forms used by Latin-derived alphabets

Some languages have extended the Latin alphabet with ligatures, modified letters, or digraphs. These symbols are listed below. The characters in the following tables may not all render, depending on which operating system and browser version are used, and the presence or absence of Unicode fonts.

Additional letter forms by type

Base letters or ligatures

Letter-diacritic combinations - attached or overlayed

All additional letter forms (base, diacritic-attached, diacritic-detached, diacritic-overlayed) in collation order

Note: The tables below are a work in progress. Eventually, table cells with light blue shading will indicate letter forms which do not constitute distinct letters in their associated alphabets. Please help with this task if you have the required linguistic knowledge and technical editing skill.

For the order in which the characters are sorted in each alphabet, see Collating sequence.

Letters associated with A-G