ISO basic Latin alphabet


The ISO basic Latin alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet and consists of two sets of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and used widely in international communication. They are the same letters that comprise the English alphabet.
The two sets contain the following 26 letters each:
Uppercase Latin alphabetABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Lowercase Latin alphabetabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

History

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 encapsulated the Latin script in their 7-bit character-encoding standard. To achieve widespread acceptance, this encapsulation was based on popular usage. 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 8859 and ISO/IEC 10646, 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.

Terminology

The Unicode block that contains the alphabet is called "C0 Controls and Basic Latin". Two subheadings exist:
There are also another two sets in the Halfwidth and Fullwidth Forms block:
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. In X-SAMPA and SAMPA these letters have the same sound value as in IPA.

Alphabets containing the same set of letters

The list below only includes alphabets that lack:
alphabetdiacriticmultigraphs ligatures
Afrikaans alphabetá, é, è, ê, ë, í, î, ï, ó, ô, ú, û, ý
Catalan alphabetà, é, è, í, ï, ó, ò, ú, ü, ç, lꞏl⟨gu⟩, ⟨ig⟩, ⟨ix⟩, ⟨ll⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨qu⟩, ⟨rr⟩, ⟨ss⟩
Dutch alphabetä, é, è, ë, ï, ö, üThe digraph ⟨ij⟩ is sometimes considered to be a separate letter. When that is the case, it usually replaces or is intermixed with ⟨y⟩. Other digraphs: ⟨aa⟩, ⟨ae⟩, ⟨ai⟩, ⟨au⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ee⟩, ⟨ei⟩, ⟨eu⟩, ⟨ie⟩, ⟨oe⟩, ⟨oi⟩, ⟨oo⟩, ⟨ou⟩, ⟨ui⟩, ⟨uu⟩
English alphabet⟨sh⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ea⟩, ⟨ou⟩, ⟨th⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨ng⟩æ, œ
French alphabetà, â, ç, é, è, ê, ë, î, ï, ô, ù, û, ü, ÿ⟨ai⟩, ⟨au⟩, ⟨ei⟩, ⟨eu⟩, ⟨oi⟩, ⟨ou⟩, ⟨eau⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨gn⟩, ⟨an⟩, ⟨am⟩, ⟨en⟩, ⟨em⟩, ⟨in⟩, ⟨im⟩, ⟨on⟩, ⟨om⟩, ⟨un⟩, ⟨um⟩, ⟨yn⟩, ⟨ym⟩, ⟨ain⟩, ⟨aim⟩, ⟨ein⟩, ⟨oin⟩, ⟨aî⟩, ⟨eî⟩æ, œ
German alphabetä, ö, ü⟨sch⟩, ⟨qu⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ph⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ie⟩, ⟨ck⟩, ⟨ei⟩, ⟨eu⟩, ⟨äu⟩ß
Italian alphabet à, è, é, ì, ò, ù⟨ch⟩, ⟨ci⟩, ⟨gh⟩, ⟨gi⟩, ⟨gl⟩, ⟨gli⟩, ⟨gn⟩, ⟨sc⟩, ⟨sci⟩
Ido alphabet⟨qu⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨sh⟩
Indonesian alphabet⟨kh⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨sy⟩, diphthongs: ai, au, oi
Interlingua alphabet⟨qu⟩
Javanese Latin alphabeté, è⟨dh⟩, ⟨kh⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨sy⟩, ⟨th⟩
Luxembourgish alphabetä, é, ë
Malay alphabet⟨gh⟩, ⟨kh⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ny⟩, ⟨sy⟩
Portuguese alphabetã, õ, á, é, í, ó, ú, â, ê, ô, à, ç⟨ch⟩, ⟨lh⟩, ⟨nh⟩, ⟨rr⟩, ⟨ss⟩, ⟨am⟩, ⟨em⟩, ⟨im⟩, ⟨om⟩, ⟨um⟩, ⟨ãe⟩, ⟨ão⟩, ⟨õe⟩
Sundanese Latin alphabeté⟨eu⟩, ⟨ng⟩, ⟨ny⟩

English is one of few modern European language requiring no diacritics for native words.
Malay and Indonesian are the only languages outside Europe that use all the Latin alphabet and require no diacritics and ligatures. Many of the 700+ languages of Indonesia, such as Javanese, also use the Indonesian alphabet to write their languages.

Column numbering

The Roman alphabet is commonly used for column numbering in a table or chart. This avoids confusion with row numbers using Arabic numerals. For example, a 3-by-3 table would contain Columns A, B, and C, set against Rows 1, 2, and 3. If more columns are needed beyond Z, the column immediately after Z is AA, followed by AB, and so on. This can be seen by scrolling far to the right in a spreadsheet program such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc.
These are double-digit "letters" for table columns, in the same way that 10 through 99 are double-digit numbers. The Greek alphabet has a similar extended form that uses such double-digit letters if necessary, but it is used for chapters of a fraternity as opposed to columns of a table.
Such double-digit letters for bullet points are AA, BB, CC, etc., as opposed to the number-like place value system explained above for table columns.