<P> By the 18th century, the standard Latin alphabet comprised the 26 letters we are familiar with today . </P> <P> During colonialism, the alphabet began its spread around the world, being employed for previously unwritten languages, notably in the wake of Christianization, being used in Bible translations . It spread to the Americas, Australia, and parts of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, along with the Spanish, Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch languages . </P> <P> In the late 18th century, the Romanians adopted the Latin alphabet; although Romanian is a Romance language, the Romanians were predominantly Orthodox Christians, and until the 19th century the Church used the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet . Vietnam, under French rule, adapted the Latin alphabet for Vietnamese, which had previously used Chinese characters . The Latin alphabet is also used for many Austronesian languages, including Tagalog and the other languages of the Philippines, and the official Malaysian and Indonesian, replacing earlier Arabic and indigenous Brahmic alphabets . </P> <P> In 1928, as part of Kemal Atatürk's reforms, Turkey adopted the Latin alphabet for the Turkish language, replacing the Arabic alphabet . Most of Turkic - speaking peoples of the former USSR, including Tatars, Bashkirs, Azeri, Kazakh, Kyrgyz and others, used the Uniform Turkic alphabet in the 1930s . In the 1940s all those alphabets were replaced by Cyrillic . After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, several of the newly independent Turkic - speaking republics adopted the Latin alphabet, replacing Cyrillic . Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan have officially adopted the Latin alphabet for Azeri, Uzbek, and Turkmen, respectively . In the 1970s, the People's Republic of China developed an official transliteration of Mandarin Chinese into the Latin alphabet, called Pinyin, used to aid children and foreigners in learning the pronunciation of Chinese characters . Aside from that, Chinese characters are used for reading and writing . </P>

Where did the romans get their alphabet from