ISO basic Latin alphabet

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) basic Latin alphabet consists of the following 26 letters:^[1][2]

By the 1960s it became apparent to the computer and telecommunications industries in the First World that a non-proprietary method of encoding characters was needed. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) encapsulated the Latin script in their (ISO/IEC 646) standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. As the United States held a pre-eminent position in both industries during the 1960s, the standard was based on the already published American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII, which included in the character set the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet. Later standards issued by the ISO, for example ISO/IEC 10646 (Unicode Latin), have continued to define the 26 × 2 letters of the English alphabet as the basic Latin script with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.^[1]

Representation

Arabic numerals and letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet on a typical 16-segment display.

In ASCII the letters belong to the printable characters and in Unicode since version 1.0 they belong to the block "C0 Controls and Basic Latin". In both cases, as well as in ISO/IEC 646, ISO/IEC 8859 and ISO/IEC 10646 they are occupying the positions in hexadecimal notation 41 to 5A for uppercase and 61 to 7A for lowercase.

Not case sensitive, all letters have code words in the ICAO spelling alphabet and can be represented with Morse code.

Usage

All of the lowercase letters are used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). In X-SAMPA and SAMPA these letters have the same sound value as in IPA. In Kirshenbaum they have the same value except for the letter r.

Equivalent alphabets

Alphabets that are equivalent in the sense that they consist of the same 26 letters – possibly also used in combination with diacritics, provided that letters thereby modified are not considered distinct letters of the alphabet:

• Afrikaans alphabet: uses diacritics.
• Catalan alphabet: uses diacritics (à, é, è, í, ï, ó, ò, ú, ü, ç)
• Dutch alphabet: the digraph ⟨ij⟩ is sometimes considered to be a separate letter. When that is the case, it usually replaces or is intermixed with ⟨y⟩.
• English alphabet
• Folkspraak alphabet
• French alphabet: uses à, â, æ, ç, é, è, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, œ, ù, û, ü, ÿ
• German alphabet: uses ä, ö, ü and ß
• Ido alphabet
• Indonesian alphabet
• Interglossa alphabet
• Interlingua alphabet
• Malay alphabet: besides Latin (Rumi) alphabet, Malay also uses Jawi script, a modified Arabic script, to some extent.
• Occidental alphabet
• Portuguese alphabet: uses diacritics. k, w, and y are considered part of the alphabet since the 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement, which came into effect on January 1, 2009 in Brazil.

English and Dutch^{[citation needed]} are unique among major modern European languages in requiring no diacritics for native words (although a diaeresis is used by some publishers in words such as "coöperation").^[3][4]

See also

• Hebrew alphabet
• Latin alphabet
• Latin-derived alphabet

References