Coverage of European languages by ISO Latin alphabets

This document presents the coverage of languages of European origin by ISO Latin alphabets (Latin alphabets No. 1 through 9 as defined by ISO 8859).

The basic information is from Annex A (informative) of draft standard ISO 8859-15, called the Annex in this document.

Legend (see the notes for detailed explanations):

• An asterisk (*) after a number n in the table indicates that (according to the Annex) Latin alphabet No. n is not completely adequate for the language in question.
• An exclamation mark (!) indicates that the alphabet is not listed in the Annex among those covering the language, but one can present arguments why it could be listed as such, at least with reservations.
• A question mark (?) indicates that the alphabet is listed in the Annex (without reservations) as covering the language, but there are in fact limitations in the coverage.

Notes

General notes:

• There are several official written languages outside Europe that are covered by some ISO Latin alphabet(s). For example, Latin alphabet No. 1 covers Indonesian/Malay, Tagalog (in Philippines), Swahili, and Afrikaans.
• In this context, coverage basically refers to the availability of letters. There can be problems with punctuation symbols, especially with various quotation marks and dashes.

Note I (Cornish): Cornish is an extinct language with varying orthographies. According to a document on Cornish language varieties, some orthographies for "revived Cornish" use letters with diacritic marks. This is probably the reason why the Annex lists only Latin alphabets No. 1, 5, and 8 as suitable for Cornish.

Note II (Danish): The Annex does not Latin alphabets No. 7 as covering Danish, but in fact it has all letters needed in Danish. Cf. to note VIII.

Note III (Finnish): There are some characters in official Finnish orthography which are not covered in Latin alphabets No. 1, 5, and 8, namely "s" and "z" with caron. See notes on ISO Latin 9.

The Annex does not list Latin alphabets No. 2 and 3 as covering Finnish. However, alphabet 3 contains the same Finnish letters as alphabet 1, including "ä" and "ö" but excluding "s" and "z" with caron, and alphabet 2 contains the latter too, so it actually covers Finnish better than alphabet 1 does! Perhaps the reason for not listing alphabets 2 and 3 here is that they lack the letter "å" which is used in Swedish (and Danish and Norwegian). Although names containing that letter occur relatively often in texts otherwise in Finnish, this is in principle not different from other occurrences of foreign names (and loan words, like fiancé) in their original spelling. Generally, if one starts taking such occurrences into account when considering which alphabets cover a given language, there is no way to tell when to stop.

Note IV (French): There are some characters in French which are not covered in Latin alphabets No. 1, 3, 5, and 8, namely oe ligature and capital Y with diaeresis. See notes on ISO Latin 9.

Note V (German): The Annex does not Latin alphabets No. 7 as covering German, but in fact it has all letters needed in German. Cf. to note VIII.

Note VI (Irish Gaelic): Latin alphabets No. 5, 6, and 9 are not suitable for Irish Gaelic when the old orthography is used.

Note VII (Latin): The Annex lists Latin alphabets No. 7 as covering Latin. However, Latin is often written so that e with diaeresis is used in some words (e.g. aër), and alphabet 7 does not contain that letter.

Note VIII (Polish): The Annex lists Latin alphabets No. 2 as the only one that covers Polish. However, alphabet 7 was developed to cover the needs of Latin-alphabet languages spoken in countries bordering the Baltic Sea ("Baltic Rim"), and Polish is explicitly mentioned among those languages in the definition of alphabet 7 (i.e. ISO 8859-13).

Note IX (Romanian): According to the Romanian Standards Institute, the diacritic mark which may appear under letters "s" and "t" in Romanian is not cedilla but comma below. Thus, strictly speaking no ISO Latin alphabet is suitable for Romanian, but Latin alphabet No. 2 can be used "subject to the agreement of originator and receiver in information exchange".

Note X (Sámi): The various Sámi languages and dialects have partly different spelling systems. Latin alphabets No. 4 and 6 cover the requirements of most Sámi orthographies, but for Skolt Sámi no ISO Latin alphabet is sufficient.

Note XI (Slovenian): The Annex lists Latin alphabets No. 2, 4, and 6 as covering Slovenian. However, it seems that alphabet 7 covers it too, since Slovenian needs, in addition to ASCII letters, only the letters "c", "s", and "z" with caron.

Note XII (Swedish): The Annex does not list Latin alphabet No. 7 as applicable to Swedish. There is no obvious reason to this, since that alphabet contains all the letters used in Swedish, such as "ä", "ö", "å", and "é". Perhaps the composers of the Annex thought that some names of foreign origin containing accented characters are used so often in Swedish that Latin alphabet No. 7 is not suitable for Swedish. An (expired) Internet draft titled Characters and character sets for various languages lists the letters äöåÄÖÅ (in addition to ASCII letters, of course) as "required characters" and áéëüÁÉËÜ as "important characters" for Swedish. Alphabet 7 lacks áÁëË, but these can hardly be regarded as necessary for Swedish (cf. to second part of note III).

Note XIII (Turkish): The use of Latin alphabet No. 3 for Turkish is deprecated.

The language names are links to relevant entries in the collection of link lists for several languages on the Human Languages Page (a large catalog of language-related Internet pages).

Date of last update: 1998-12-01