All of the lowercase letters are used in the
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). 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 include all the 26 letters but exclude: • letters whose
diacritical marks make them distinct letters. •
multigraphs that constitute distinct letters. •
ligatures that are distinct letters. Notable omissions due to these rules include
Spanish,
Esperanto,
Filipino and
German. The German alphabet is sometimes considered by tradition to contain only 26 letters (with , , considered variants and considered a ligature of (
long s) and ), but the current German orthographic rules include , , , in the alphabet placed after . In Spanish orthography, the letters and are distinct; the
tilde is not considered a diacritic in this case. • Constructed languages • English is one of the few modern European languages requiring no diacritics for native words (although a
diaeresis is used by some American publishers in words such as "
coöperation"). •
Interlingua, a constructed language, never uses diacritics except in unassimilated loanwords. However, they can be removed if they are not used to modify the vowel (e.g.
cafe, from ). •
Latino sine flexione, a.k.a. "Peano's Interlingua",
allows but does not require the placement of an accent for unusual stress. (It antedates the other "Interlingua" by roughly four decades.) • Malay and Indonesian (based on Malay) use all the Latin alphabet and require no diacritics and ligatures. However, Malay and Indonesian learning materials may use ⟨é⟩ (E with acute) to clarify the pronunciation of the letter E; in that case, ⟨e⟩ is pronounced /ə/ while ⟨é⟩ is pronounced /e/ and (è) is pronounced /ɛ/. Many of the
700+ languages of Indonesia also use the Indonesian alphabet to write their languages, some—such as
Javanese—adding diacritics é and è, and some omitting q, x, and z. • Xhosa is usually written without diacritics, but may optionally use diacritics over for tones: .
Column numbering The Roman (Latin) 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 (normally the final letter of the alphabet), the column immediately after Z is AA, followed by AB, and so on (see
bijective base-26 system). This can be seen by scrolling far to the right in a spreadsheet program such as
Microsoft Excel or
LibreOffice Calc. The letters are often used for indexing nested bullet points. In this case after the 26th it is more common to use AA, BB, CC, ... instead of base-26 numbers. == See also ==