You May Not Believe How Alphabets Vary | Berlitz Canada (2024)

FAQs

How many alphabets are there in Canada? ›

If you are talking about the word “alphabet”, and we spell it the same, there are eight letters. If you are talking about the composition of the number of letters in the English language in Canada where I live, there are twenty six.

Many of the languages we're familiar with have 26 letters, including English, French and German. The Italian alphabet has 21 letters, 29 in Spanish, 33 in Russian and 28 in Arabic.

The Rotokas alphabet, which is used in writing Rotokas language, is the smallest alphabet currently in use. It is a subset of the Latin alphabet and only has twelve letters: A E I G K O P R S T U V. Most Rotokas people are literate in their own tongue.

Canadian spelling isn't quite the same as anyone else's. It's no secret that we Canadians spell differently from our cousins in the United States: We put a “u” in words like “colour” and “favour”; Americans leave it out. We spell “theatre” and “centre” with an “re” at the end; they spell them with an “er”

The NATO phonetic alphabet is internationally recognized and is commonly used in Canada and throughout the world.

Total number of letters in the alphabet

Until 1835, the English Alphabet consisted of 27 letters: right after "Z" the 27th letter of the alphabet was ampersand (&). The English Alphabet (or Modern English Alphabet) today consists of 26 letters: 23 from Old English and 3 added later.

If, when you reach Z, you start from the beginning again, it COULD be said that the 28th letter is B, but that would get very confusing, so we just call B the second letter. In short, there is no 28th letter because the alphabet only has 26.

In the 1st century BC, Z was put in the alphabet again at the end of the Latin alphabet. This was done to accurately represent the sound of the Greek zeta. The letter Z appeared only in Greek words, and is the only letter besides Y that the Romans took from Greek.

The Tamil alphabet has 12 vowels, 18 consonants, 12 vowels by 18 consonants, 1 unique character ஃ totalling 247 letters.

What's the rarest alphabet? ›

The rarest letters in English are j, q, x, and z.

In the orthography of Modern English, the letters thorn (þ), eth (ð), wynn (ƿ), yogh (ȝ), ash (æ), and ethel (œ) are obsolete.

The language with the most letters is Khmer (Cambodian), with 74 (including some without any current use).

In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.

Both “zed” and “zee” are acceptable pronunciations for the letter Z in Canada, though “zed” is much more common. Be warned, however, that some people feel very strongly that it is a betrayal of Canadian nationality to say “zee” and you may incur their wrath if you do so.

The modern English alphabet has 26 letters: 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.