Capitalization

In addition to the Latin script, capitalization also affects the Armenian, Cyrillic, Georgian and Greek alphabets.

Owing to the essentially arbitrary nature of orthographic classification and the existence of variant authorities and local house styles, questionable capitalization of words is not uncommon, even in respected newspapers and magazines.

British and U.S. publishers have established in style guides for their authors: Upper case: East Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Central America, North Korea, South Africa, the European Union, the Republic of Poland, the North Atlantic, the Middle East, the Arctic, The Gambia, The Bahamas, The Hague Lower case: western China, southern Beijing, western Mongolia, eastern Africa, northern North Korea, the central Gobi, the lower Yangtze River.

Long spans of Latin-alphabet text in all uppercase are harder to read because of the absence of the ascenders and descenders found in lowercase letters, which can aid recognition.

[21] In addition, if all caps must be used, it is customary in headings of a few words to slightly widen the spacing between the letters, by around 10% of the point height.

So the general rule that nouns-as-names are capitalized in principle applies to compound names and noun-phrases-as-names as well.

The Chicago Manual of Style recommends that the titles of English-language artistic works (plays, novels, essays, paintings, etc.)

[31] Some attribute this to the fact that diacritics on capital letters were not available earlier on typewriters, and it is now becoming more common to preserve them in French and Spanish (in both languages the rule is to preserve them,[32] although in France and Mexico, for instance, schoolchildren are often erroneously taught that they should not add diacritics on capital letters).

However, in the polytonic orthography used for Greek prior to 1982, accents were omitted in all-uppercase words, but kept as part of an uppercase initial (written before rather than above the letter).

When Greek is written with the present day monotonic orthography, where only the acute accent is used, the same rule is applied.

The dialytika (diaeresis) should also always be used in all-uppercase words (even in cases where they are not needed when writing in lowercase, e.g. ΑΫΛΟΣ — άυλος).

[33] Presentation forms, however, can use doubled capitals, such as the logo of the National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru).

For example, in Irish, in the placename Sliabh na mBan, "(the) mountain of the women" (anglicized as Slievenamon), the word-form written mBan contains the genitive plural of the noun bean, "woman", mutated after the genitive plural definite article (i.e., "of the").

Other languages may capitalize the initial letter of the orthographic word, even if it is not present in the base, as with definite nouns in Maltese that start with certain consonant clusters.

For example, l-Istati Uniti (the United States) capitalize the epenthetic I, even though the base form of the word — without the definite article — is stati.