WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Latin
47 languages here are written in Latin, and what separates them is how far past a-z they reach: from the 12 that manage with a-z alone to Vietnamese at 33. They take 2 layouts between them — Latin QWERTY family and US QWERTY — so the language you pick decides the map you learn.
The most widely used alphabet in the world, and the one your keyboard is built around. Its 26 letters are enough for very few of the languages that use it, so most add diacritics — accents, cedillas, carons, macrons — which is where almost all the typing difficulty lives. A language here can need nothing beyond a-z, as English and Indonesian do, or 33 extra characters, as Vietnamese does.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Distinct characters
- 118 distinct characters across 3,523 practice words
- Latin keyboard layouts
- Latin QWERTY family, US QWERTY
- Keyboard guide
- shows the physical keys, and says so — no layout map yet
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in all 47 languages below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- a2,121
- i1,197
- e1,111
- n1,085
- o907
- r749
- t735
- s667
- u657
- m651
The longest practice word in this script is kinahanglan in Cebuano, and the widest bank to practise from is Filipino at 111 words.
The 47 languages written in Latin
- AfrikaansAfrikaans
- AlbanianShqip
- AzerbaijaniAzərbaycan
- BasqueEuskara
- CatalanCatalà
- CebuanoBinisaya
- CroatianHrvatski
- CzechČeština
- DanishDansk
- DutchNederlands
- EnglishEnglish
- EsperantoEsperanto
- EstonianEesti
- FilipinoFilipino
- FinnishSuomi
- FrenchFrançais
- GermanDeutsch
- Haitian CreoleKreyòl Ayisyen
- HausaHausa
- HungarianMagyar
- IcelandicÍslenska
- IndonesianBahasa Indonesia
- IrishGaeilge
- ItalianItaliano
- JavaneseBasa Jawa
- LatvianLatviešu
- LithuanianLietuvių
- LuxembourgishLëtzebuergesch
- MalayBahasa Melayu
- MalteseMalti
- MāoriTe Reo Māori
- NorwegianNorsk
- PolishPolski
- PortuguesePortuguês
- RomanianRomână
- SlovakSlovenčina
- SlovenianSlovenščina
- SomaliSoomaali
- SpanishEspañol
- SwahiliKiswahili
- SwedishSvenska
- TurkishTürkçe
- UzbekOʻzbek
- VietnameseTiếng Việt
- WelshCymraeg
- YorubaYorùbá
- ZuluisiZulu
Other writing systems
- Cyrillic Developed in the ninth century and now used across Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia.
- Arabic Written right to left, with letters that change shape depending on whether they start, sit inside, or end a word — and most of them join to the letter after.
- Devanagari An abugida, where each consonant carries an inherent vowel that other marks replace.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.