Latin

 The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today.

The Romans borrowed their alphabet from the Etruscans ruled by early Rome, whose alphabet was based on a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cymatic alphabet.

The oldest known Latin alphabet (inscription of Duenos)

The oldest known Latin alphabet is an inscription on a coin, several spherical vases ,joined together with clay.

It was found in 1880 by a German archaeologist on the Quirinale hill in Rome and is now on display in a museum in Berlin.

It was subsequently adapted and further modified by the Romans to write the Latin language.

During the Middle Ages the Latin alphabet was adopted for all Romance languages; later it was adapted for Celtic, Germanic, Baltic and some Slavic languages such as Polish and Czech.

In the colonial era it was extended both to the American continent and adopted for the writing of Indian languages but also in Africa and Australia.

In the early years of the Soviet Union the Latin alphabet was adopted for writing all indigenous non-Slavic languages; it was later replaced by Cyrillic.

Today the Latin alphabet with its various variants is the most widespread in the world.

The Latin alphabet has 26 letters:

the Latin language

Latin was originally spoken in the small region of Latium, around a then insignificant city of Rome.

After the domination of the Roman republic in the Italian peninsula, Latin prevailed over all the local languages, many of which were completely supplanted.

Latium

 Latin followed the expansion of the Romans and especially in Western Europe the spread it experienced was enormous.

In Gaul and Spain all the indigenous languages were eventually lost.

The same happened in the northern Balkans, as in the case of Romanian. Albanian was also going to become a neo-Latin language but was spared at the last minute because of the arrival of the Slavs.

A vulgar variant of the language which Cicero called sermon vulgi, seems to have been spoken by the people alongside classical Latin. Popular Latin was never written down and there are only references to words and phrases in various writers and graffiti.

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