22letter

22letter is a proposed Latin-script alphabet and typographic system designed to streamline writing and digital presentation across languages that use the Latin script. The core concept centers on a 22-letter alphabet intended to cover a broad range of common phonemes, with diacritics available to represent extended sounds where needed. The core set consists of A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, X, and Y. The letters J, Q, W, and Z are not part of the core alphabet, reflecting a deliberate simplification intended for international readability while leaving room for phonetic variation through diacritics and digraphs.

Origin and development reformulate the idea as a multidisciplinary project by linguists and typographers. The initiative released the system publicly in the mid-2010s and has since produced guidelines for typography, orthography, and digital encoding to ensure compatibility with Unicode and common font formats. The project emphasizes legibility, ease of learning, and smoother keyboard layouts for multilingual contexts.

Design and usage considerations describe how 22letter functions as an auxiliary or reform proposal rather than a replacement for established national alphabets. It relies on diacritics to represent additional sounds and permits digraphs when necessary. Practical applications have appeared in educational tools, experimental typography, and font demonstrations, alongside discussions about the potential impacts on languages that rely on letters not included in the core set. The proposal has attracted both support for its simplicity and criticism for its potential loss of linguistic nuance in some contexts.