Historians and linguists consider that the origins of the Latin alphabet date back to the Phoenician civilization around the 13th century BC in Greece and the Mediterranean Sea. They created a consonantal alphabet called abjad, which was borrowed by other languages in the region for the innovative nature of its phonetic system, and due to the large influence of the Phoenician people as principal traders and navigators. This alphabet later led to multiple derivatives, including Greek and Latin alphabets.

The Latin alphabet evolved from the Greek, with a Proto-Latin appearing around the 2nd century BC. It started by taking some of the Greek letters and modifying them, adding or removing others to fit better with the Latin language, spoken by Roman civilization (which is why it is also called the Roman alphabet).

The modern Latin alphabet contains 26 distinct letters from its most basic set, with uppercase and lowercase forms for each. Many languages using the Latin alphabet have additional letters, ligatures or digraphs (e.g., æ, œ) to better adapt to the sounds of each.

With Eurocentrism ideology (main focus on European culture), the type design industry has also been largely focused on scripts used by the Western world: Latin in particular, with hundreds of years of practice, experience, theories, teaching and conventions, exhibitions and festivals mainly about this script. But, thanks to the increasing international exchanges and efforts to create a perspective beyond those boundaries, the type design industry is currently evolving into a much richer and diverse typographic culture.