Latin script

Latin
Roman
Latin; Roman;
Script type	Bicameral impure Alphabet
Time period	~700 BC–present
Direction	left-to-right
Languages	Most western European languages, including Latin; many Turkic, Finno-Ugric and Eskimo–Aleut languages; Basque language; Polynesian languages; some African, Austronesian and Austroasiatic languages;
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician alphabet Greek alphabet Old Italic script Latin; Roman; ; ; ; ;
Child systems	Fraser alphabet (Lisu); Osage script; (partially) several phonetic alphabets, such as IPA, which have been used to write languages with no native script; (partially) Pollard script (Miao); (partially) Caroline Island script (Woleaian); (indirectly) Cherokee syllabary; (indirectly, partially) Yugtun script
Sister systems	Cyrillic; Armenian; Georgian; Coptic; Runic/Futhark
ISO 15924
ISO 15924	Latn (215), Latin
Unicode
Unicode alias	Latin
Unicode range	See Latin characters in Unicode
	This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

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The Latin or Roman script is a writing system used to write many modern-day languages including English. It is the most used writing system in the world today. It is the official script for nearly all the languages of Western Europe and of some Eastern European languages. It is also used by some non-European languages such as Turkish, Vietnamese, Malay, Indonesian, Somali, Swahili and Tagalog. It is an alternative writing system for languages such as Serbian and Hindi.

The alphabet is a writing system which evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet. It was the Etruscans who first developed it after borrowing the Greek alphabet, and the Romans developed it further. The sounds of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained and several writing styles ('hands') developed. Two such styles were combined into one script with upper and lower case letters ('capitals' and 'small letters'). Modern capital letters differ only slightly from their Roman counterparts. There are few regional variations.