Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet in character encoding
The 26 Latin letters (A-Z) form the basis of ASCII character codes 65-90 (uppercase) and 97-122 (lowercase). Derived from the ancient Roman alphabet, which itself evolved from Etruscan and ultimately Phoenician, the Latin script is now used to write over 60% of the world's languages.
Many of those languages add diacritical marks to base Latin letters: acute (Spanish, French), cedilla (French, Turkish), caron (Czech, Slovak), tilde (Spanish, Portuguese), circumflex (French, Romanian), and diaeresis/umlaut (German, Finnish). Base ASCII cannot represent these - you need extended ASCII encodings or Unicode. See all Latin-derived characters in our Latin character group.
Many of those languages add diacritical marks to base Latin letters: acute (Spanish, French), cedilla (French, Turkish), caron (Czech, Slovak), tilde (Spanish, Portuguese), circumflex (French, Romanian), and diaeresis/umlaut (German, Finnish). Base ASCII cannot represent these - you need extended ASCII encodings or Unicode. See all Latin-derived characters in our Latin character group.