Spread of the Latin script

In the Age of Discovery, the first wave of European colonization saw the adoption of Latin alphabets primarily in the Americas and Australia, whereas sub-Saharan Africa, maritime Southeast Asia, and the Pacific were Latinised in the period of New Imperialism.

In the early 21st century, non-Latin writing systems were only still prevalent in most parts of the Middle East and North Africa, the post-Soviet states, and Asia, and some Balkan countries.

[6] After the subjugation of Southern Italy in the Pyrrhic War (280–275 BCE), Messapic (using a Greek-derived alphabet) disappeared completely, and with the exception of the two Griko enclaves that still exist in the 21st century, Latin replaced all Greek in Magna Graecia.

[4] After the First Punic War (264–241 BCE), the Latin script gradually took over written communication on Sardinia from Paleo-Sardinian (also termed "Nuragic"), on Corsica from Paleo-Corsican, and on Sicily from Greek and the local Sicula, Sicani, and Elymian languages.

[5] The Latinisation of Italy was resisted by various ethnic groups, however, most notably the Samnites, who regarded their Oscan language and script as part of their identity, and employed it in clear opposition to Rome, for example in coinage during the Social War (91–87 BCE).

[4] According to Lomas (2004), the crucial factor in Latinising these remaining groups that resisted full integration was granting them Roman citizenship (most notably by the Lex Iulia de Civitate Latinis et Sociis Danda in 90 BCE), thereby leading them to participate in Roman–Latin society and gradually abandon their Italic, Etruscan, Celtic etc.

[5] After the defeat of Ancient Carthage (Third Punic War 149–146 BCE), the Punic-speaking urban centres of North Africa were Latinised to an extent, while the rural areas remained Berber-speaking.

On the other hand, the Roman conquest of Britain (42–87 CE) never led to deep Latinisation of the local population;[5] although most inscriptions found are in Latin, the tribes continued to speak Brittonic dialects.

Most of this work was done on parchment codices (replacing the earlier papyrus scrolls) by Frankish monks in scriptoria of monasteries, with a focus on preserving classical Greek and Latin texts as well as Biblical books and patristic commentaries through copying.

[11] Many Central European regions south of the limes that were never fully Latinised in Roman times, including modern Austria, Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, the Rhineland, Alsace (Alsatian and Lorraine Franconian), and Alemannic Switzerland, all (re-)Germanised at different points in late Antiquity due to the large influx of Germanic-speaking groups from the north.

Since the 15th and especially 16th centuries, European colonisation has spread the Latin script around the world, to the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Asia and Africa (until about 1880 mostly limited to the coastal areas) and the Pacific, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages.

Romanian intellectuals in Hungary (part of Austria-Hungary), mainly in Transylvania and Banat, and scholars in Wallachia-Moldavia agreed to cleanse the language from all non-Latin elements (Greek, Magyar, Slavic, and Ottoman), and to emulate French wherever needed.

[18] This Vietnamese alphabet (chữ quốc ngữ or "national script") was gradually expanded from its initial domain in Christian writing to become more popular among the general public, which had previously used Chinese-based characters.

During the French protectorate (1883–1945), colonial rulers made an effort to educate all Vietnamese, and a simpler writing system was found more expedient for teaching and communication with the general population.

[18] To further the process, Vietnamese written with the alphabet was made obligatory for all public documents in 1910 by issue of a decree by the French Résident Supérieur of the protectorate of Tonkin in northern Vietnam.

There were attempts at standardisation throughout the 19th century, from 1879 led by the Society for the Publication of Albanian Writings, culminating in the 1908 Congress of Manastir when a single Latin script, Bashkimi, was chosen for the whole language.

[27] As a remnant of the romanization era, for official writing of the Zhuang language the Latin alphabet was chosen over some form of standardised centuries-old Sawndip script based on Chinese characters.

In the 1860s, Vuk's orthography gained acceptance in Serbia, while a Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts was founded in 1866 in Zagreb and the first 'Serbo-Croatian' grammar book by Pero Budmani was published in Croatia in 1867.

The post-war Titoist Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia made another attempt at achieving linguistic unity, but the 1954 Novi Sad Agreement only managed to get equality of Latin and Cyrillic, and an obligation for all citizens to learn both alphabets.

Exacerbated by the Yugoslav Wars that led to the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, nationalists on all sides resumed insisting Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin were distinct languages in their own right, undermining the project of Serbo-Croatian linguistic unity.

Most of the Turkic-speaking peoples of the Soviet Union, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azerbaijani or Azeri, Kazakh (1929–40[33]), Kyrgyz and others, used the Latin-based Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s; but, in the 1940s, all were replaced by Cyrillic.

Although totalitarian dictator Saparmurat Niyazov, ruling Turkmenistan from 1985 to his death in 2006, announced a decree on 12 April 1993 that formalised a new Turkmen Latin alphabet, the de facto implementation has been slow and incomplete.

Although by 2011 the younger generations were well-versed in the Turkmen Latin alphabet through the education system, adults, including teachers, were not given any official training programme and were expected to learn it by themselves without state support.

This was motivated by pragmatic reasons: the government was wary to alienate the country's large Russian-speaking minority (who wrote Russian in Cyrillic), and due to the economic crisis in the early 1990s, a transition was considered fiscally unfeasible at the time.

In 2006, President Nursultan Nazarbayev requested the Ministry of Education and Science to examine the experiences of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, which had all switched to Latin script in the 20th century.

However, unlike in the other Turkic-dominated former Soviet republics in Central Asia, the issue did not become prominent until its great neighbour Kazakhstan in September 2015 and April 2017 confirmed its previous announcements to Latinise the closely related Kazakh language.

[58] In general, proponents of calling the language "Montenegrin" – including the DPS-led governments (1990–2020) – tend to favour the Latin script, whereas supporters of "Serbian" prefer Cyrillic.

[59] In June 2016, an incident in which top students in primary and secondary schools for the first time since World War II received their "Luca" diplomas – named after Njegoš's poem – printed in the Latin alphabet, sparked political controversy.

He said there wasn't any kind of conspiracy going on against the Cyrillic alphabet, but rather that the spirit of the times, historical circumstances and the decades-long process of globalisation had gradually made Latin the world's dominant script.

[65] In the 19th century, the so-called Alphabet War occurred amongst linguists in Galicia, during which pro-Polish Ukrainophile scholars argued for Latinisation of Ukrainian (then called "Ruthenian"), while anti-Polish Galician Russophiles (or Moscophiles) sought closer cultural attachment to the Russian language and favoured the continued use of Cyrillic.