ISO basic Latin alphabet
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) basic Latin alphabet consists of the following 26 letters:
| Majuscule Forms (also called uppercase or capital letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
| Minuscule Forms (also called lowercase or small letters) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | h | i | j | k | l | m | n | o | p | q | r | s | t | u | v | w | x | y | z |
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 alphabet 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 alphabet with extensions to handle other letters in other languages.
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
- 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
- French alphabet
- German alphabet, the orthography includes ä, ö, and ü and in Germany and Austria includes ß, but they are not part of the alphabet
- Ido alphabet
- Interglossa alphabet
- Interlingua alphabet
- Malay alphabet
- Occidental alphabet
- Portuguese alphabet, assuming k, w, and y to be part of the alphabet as is done by the 1990 Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement, which came into effect on January 1, 2009 in Brazil
English and Dutch are unique among major modern European languages in requiring no diacritics for native wordsTemplate:Citation needed (although a diaeresis is used by The New Yorker in words such as "coöperation").
See also
