Why Do So Many Languages Use The Latin Alphabet?

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SOURCES & FURTHER READING

[alexrobi]

One thing about sharing an alphabet is it makes learning to read a foreign language much easier.

[kalzium]

I would also mention the printing press. It helped to standardize the latin alphabet.

[evolancer]

Cause the Romans came, saw, and conquered

[robertlandrum]

One thing that will keep the Latin Alphabet going into the foreseeable future is the computer keyboard ⌨️. As long as we need a keyboard interface in order to enter the Internet, the Latin Alphabet will be the most efficient alphabet to use.

[PeloquinDavid]

The Cyrillic script (named after a Greek Orthodox missionary to the Slavic peoples) is over 1000 years old and was very much based on the Greek alphabet. But because of the much larger range of sounds used in Slavic languages, it had to add a whole lot of new letters (sometimes different ones in the various Slavic languages that still use the script).

Something similar happened (though over a 1000 years earlier) in the West. The Latin alphabet too was based on Greek - much more than the (also Greek-derived) Etruscan script) but had FEWER sounds than Greek and so didn't really use a lot of the Greek letters. It wasn't until later (the Middle Ages or even the post-printing early Modern era) that we got to even the current set of 26 letters used in English. But the relatively few letters that were required to transcribe the sounds of Latin were also too few to transcribe the sounds of even most of its daughter Romance languages (hence all those accents and other diacritics). Reproducing the sounds of Germanic, Slavic and Celtic languages required combining multiple letters to represent dipthongs and other vowel sounds not used in Latin as well as multiletter consonant combinations (often using the otherwise underused "H" in forming "th", "sh" and "ch" sounds or all those combinations involving "Z" in Polish, say).

[TootlinGeoff]

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

[TheStadtpark]

Why would you want every language to use their own Alphabet? XD That's TOO MANY! Too Complicated to pick up and learn! It's enough we have all these diacritics around!

[sheaux]

I thought you would've talked about how Turkish and Vietnamese chose to use the Latin alphabet.

[ronfleetwood]

I am a linguistic student and Im also Kahtnuht'ana Dena'ina, we are located up in Alaska. and the languae is part of the Na-Dene family tree and I would love to work on a Na-Dene script as I am learning Dena'ina language. I know we have pictographs up here on coastal rocks.

[JeremyWS]

I think it's kind of neat that a lot of languages use the Latin alphabet. It makes learning foreign languages somewhat easier, when you don't have to learn a new script / alphabet. I also think it'd be cool if English used diacritics. There have been proposals to apply diacritics to English, but none have really stuck. Mostly, because they aren't all trying to apply diacritics without a full-on spelling reform. Applying diacritics without a full-on spelling reform would be the easiest, because then you would just have to learn rules on when to use diacritics in a word vs. having to learn whole new spelling of words and rules on when to use diacritics. Still cool to use the Latin alphabet. Make sense?

[williswameyo]

In Kenya 🇰🇪: Latin Alphabet came to us thru European colonization. Swahili had initially an Arabic script and most indigenous languages in Kenya were spoken orally, had no written form

[eleandrocustodio]

A few adds: The latin script comes from the greek which comes from phoenician.
The role of the printing press was not mentioned. I mean the latin alphabet is evenly spaced, making it perfect for printing. Arabic need to be changed to benefit from the press.
Last but not least, the computers played an important role as well. Even chinese and japanese have a latinicized version.
Sources: voices of my head.

[darreljones]

This video explains why I think Christian missionaries' greatest gift to the world isn't the gift of Christianity; it's the gift of literacy.

[CosmicDorns]

The only reason the world would move to having different scripts would be because of a global apocalypse

[matertua]

Another thing to add: Cyrillic was actually based off of the Greek script, with them sort of inventing new letters for sounds that existed in Slavic languages, but not Greek itself.

This makes a lot of sense because Greece was the centre of the Byzantine (or more accurately eastern Roman) empire, which encompassed many Slavic-majority places, and also observed Orthodox Christianity, thus why large parts of Eastern Europe are majority-Orthodox to this day!

[Jánooshh]

1. Because Rome
2. Because England
Saved you 11 minutes

[maxcelcat]

Hey, not sure if it was Navajo, but one native American language group actually adopted/adapted the Latin alphabet themselves. A member of the tribe wanted to record history and produce a newspaper, and since there wasn't an existing written form, they adapted the Latin script. Within a few years the tribe became largely literate!

[Kehk-in-a-MiG]

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.

[Furienna]

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.

[edwardblair]

Written forms of language face the problem that spoken forms drift over time, often branching out into regional dialects and separate languages. The two goals of written language: to have a form that faithfully replicates the sounds of the spoken language, and to provide a permanent record that can be understood decades or centuries into the future, are in direct conflict with each other.
The process of "standardized" word spellings (or the standardized form of Chinese writing) provides for long-term comprehension, at the expense of not being strictly a record of the sounds used to make the words.