Romanian alphabet S, T). Romanian alphabet The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used by the Romanian language. It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language: The letters Q ("chiu"), W ("dublu v"), and Y ("igrec" or "i grec") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as "quasar", "watt", and "yacht".
African reference alphabet African reference alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations, or letters with diacritical marks. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held