 <p>Javascript doesn't support unicode properties in any way, you can't include "latin1 letter" in an expression directly and are bound to use ranges. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin-1_Supplement_%28Unicode_block%29" rel="nofollow">Latin1-supplement block</a> contains letters in <code>C0-FF</code> except two math symbols at <code>D7</code> and <code>F7</code>, hence the expression is</p> <pre><code>/[A-Za-z\u00C0-\u00D6\u00D8-\u00F6\u00F8-\u00FF]+/ </code></pre> <p>Note that this only supports west european letters. If you want to match any unicode letter, there's no way with JS regex other than manually enumerating all <code>Lu/Ll/Lm</code> ranges from the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/UnicodeData.txt" rel="nofollow">unicode database</a>.</p>