The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used
alphabetic writing system in the world today. Apart from
Latin itself, the alphabet was adapted to the direct descendants of Latin (the
Romance languages),
Germanic,
Celtic and some
Slavic languages from the
Middle Ages, and finally to most
languages of Europe. With the
age of colonialism and
Christian proselytism, the alphabet was spread overseas, and applied to
Amerindian,
Indigenous Australian,
Austronesian,
Vietnamese,
Malay and
Indonesian languages. More recently, Western
linguists have also tended to prefer the Latin alphabet or the
International Phonetic Alphabet (itself largely based on the Latin alphabet) when they transcribe or devise written standards for non-European languages; see for example the
African reference alphabet.
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