Why Do So Many Languages Use The Latin Alphabet?

Irish really shouldn't use the Latin alphabet - it is poorly equipped to handle the complexities of Irish.

aâãàábcçdeêèfghiìjkLmnoôõpqrstuùvxyz portuguese

abcčĎěfghijkLmnňoprřsštŤůvyž czech

ąćęŁńśźż Polish

ăşțâî romanian

äöüß german; åæø danish norwegian; äöõü estonian finnish

çë albanian, ğıİşçöü turkish, őű hungarian

ċġħż malta; ąčėęįųšūž lithuanian; ĀČĒīĶĻŅŠŪŽ Latvian

make a video about albania and caucasian albania

Honestly, there are some languages that desperately need a unique alphabet. Looking at Latin-alphabet Celtic and East Asian languages in particular.

The latin alphabet
* Is probably the most efficient to write with pen and paper
* Hasn't too many symbols, so it is easy to use for printed books, mechanical typewriters. Likewise, it is easy to create digital encodings.
* Is not an exact model of the phonetics of any language (for that we have IPA), but as long as you know the language of the text, it is a good compromise between the number of symbols and expressiveness. Where necessary, many languages some times (not always "stegen" should definitely not be pronounced the same as "stegen") adds diacritical symbols.
* The balanced complexity in glyph shape makes it easy to do typography.

Thus, if I spoke an oral-only language, I might as well pick the latin script for simplicity.

The European colonials would either kill you or beat the crap out of you or take all of your stuff if you didn't use their Latin alphabet. You had to use their languages too. And when you did use their letters, they took your stuff anyway. You all know that.

Correction. It was Western Christianity that used the Latin script. Eastern Christianity used Greek or Cyrillic script.

It is a good thing though that you acknowledged that the Latin alphabet doesn’t look the same for all languages.
Like for example, Swedish actually has as many as three letters that you won't see in the Romance languages or even in English: Å, Ä and Ö.
They are fixed parts of our alphabet though even though they all come after Z in the alphabetical order.
But you can find a unique letter even in one of the Romance languages: ñ in Spanish.

In believe in n the NOT-so-distant future, Hebrew will be the ONLY language spoken.

You forgot to mention the languages which had a horrible and ill fit writing system before and did a writing reform adopting the latin script, like all the Turkish languages, Zhuang, Vietnamese or all the Indonesian languages. This is not due to European colonialism, but also the features of the Latin script, which just makes it an easy to use and very flexible writing system.

The Etruscan script can be traced back to Phoenician Sanskrit. For that matter, there is some evidence that Sanskrit there is some evidence to suggest that most written languages from Ireland to Indonesia are related to Phoenician Sanskrit

Vietnam

Filipino alphabet has the 26 letters of the English alphabet plus another two more, the digraph ng and the ñ borrowed from Spanish alphabet.

The other exception to the rule, aside of Greece, of a Christian nation not using the Latin alphabet would be Georgia. The Caucasus Georgie, not the Dixie-Georgie. As they have been Christian since like the 4th century, and since around then they have been using their own unique Alphabet as well.

Languages derived from Latin are the best sounding!!!

Easy answer: 🇮🇹➡️ 🇪🇸🇬🇧🇫🇷🇵🇹 ➡️ 🌏🌍🌎

My native language, Keresan, uses the Latin Alphabet, including accents and ñ's, because prior to Spanish colonization, we did not write our language or even snap that writing down language was a thing.

Graphs* not Grophs

So glad to be Subscribed to this channel !

More alphabets? no I dont think so...
We will sooner purge the others than adopt a new one

You never mentioned that over 200 million Indonesian and Malaysian speakers use the Latin alphabet for Bahasa as their main script

I don't think there will be different alphabets in the future, quite the opposite. Because of technology, it is way easier to use the Latin alphabet as a phonetic one like I see some Egyptians do with Arab. He said they use in the time phones didn't have options for the input, so they just use the Latin letter as phonemes and get use to that. Even after they have the option to input Arab script they sometimes don't do, So he tells.

Nerd Trivia Fact: In Transnistria they use Cyrillic script for a Romance language

So many use Latin characters because of Latin America.

TFW he didnt even mention vietnam :(

The advantage of latin alphabet is it's simplicity. One letter per sound (in most cases) and the simplistic forms that are still legible even when tweaked a bit. Such as when doing ornate fonts, or when writing as fast as possible. Every letter is max four lines/strokes, which are often condensed into a single stroke when writing. Alphabets that use 200+ unique characters , where it takes a writer 5 seconds to put one character down, while fascinating are just less practical for everyday use.

This video made me want to see how tiny Europe is so I went onto Google earth since flat maps aren't fully accurate and it led to a whole adventure involving accidentally tapping on Africa and ending up is some persons house somehow????? And then trying to find my and my sisters house by just zooming in and using the place names ( took me a minute or 2 of searching for my sisters because Hertfordshire didn't show up😂) and then going on a 3d trip round London and ending up looking at the golden hinde😊

It's also worth noting how firmly computers have entrenched the Latin alphabet due to ASCII (consisting of only the English alphabet, digits 0-9, and a selection of special characters) being the basis for nearly every form of digital text. Things like usernames and URLs are typically limited to a subset of ASCII, which means just the twenty six English Latin letters. Also, heaven help you if you're dealing with a non-Unicode system where non-ASCII characters can be presented as unreadable mojibake.

Thank you! I've been wanting to know this for a while. Even though I did think it was because of the Romans, I had no idea about all the other influences

Colonialism.

WW! SCH A GD VIDIO. Y ALWYZ WNDRD DIS.

WTF is this annoying prolonging of the last alphabet? Sounds so fucking horrible.

Alphabets I think suit these languages:
Indonesian:Arabic
Kazakh:Arabic
Polish:Cyrillic
Romanian:Cyrillic

Actually, the Bible was not written in Latin. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew, while the New Testament was written in Greek. I have met many people who didn't know that. Many thought that the Bible was written in English.

The Latin alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet.

The question is, how did ppl communicate before if they didn’t have a common languages? The ancient world wasn’t disconnected as they’re starting to find out. Why pictographs or cave drawings were used yet how did the ancient interpreters really interpret each other?

I'm not giving up the Latin alphabet just because I speak English; no way.

Korean does not use those anymore. They haven't for a long time.

Socio-political drinking game- take a shot whenever the answer is “colonialism”

This is how they coined the term Latin America. The people in these territories no matter what race or ethnicity speak Spanish and Portuguese, languages based from Latin.

the latin alphabet is incredibly overrated. alphabets in general. abugidas and logographies better

Favourite letter of the alphabet?