The “Basic Latin Alphabet”, as defined by ISO, consists of the following 26 letters and their uppercase variants (and is identical to the standard English alphabet):
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
However, English is the only modern major European language that uses the Latin alphabet without any additional letters formed by adding diacritical marks or completely new symbols. Although the letter “é” may be used in words like “café” and “fiancée”, it is usually replaced by “e”. Similarly, the diaeresis (two dots) is sometimes used, e.g. “naïve”, but such usage is rare. Such rarely used symbols are written in parentheses in the following map.
On the other hand, some basic Latin letters (e.g. W and X) are only used in recent loanwords in many European languages (these are written in square brackets in the following map).
The following map shows a list of special characters used for each national European language (minority and regional languages are not included, because they often do not have completely established orthographies and there are simply too many to fit into a map). Note that not all of the characters shown in the map are considered “letters” of the alphabet; for example, the character “á” is a separate letter in the Czech alphabet but not in the Spanish alphabet.
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