Latinisation is the practice of rendering a non-Latin name (or word) in a Latin style. It is commonly found with historical personal names, with toponyms, or for the standard binomial nomenclature of the life sciences. It goes further than romanisation, which is the writing of a word in the Latin alphabet that is in another script (e.g. Cyrillic).

In the case of personal names it may be done to more closely emulate Latin authors, or to present a more impressive image. It is carried out by:

Personal names

Humanist names, i.e. pen names assumed by Renaissance humanists, were very largely latinised names, though in some cases (e.g. Melanchthon) they invoked Ancient Greek. Latinisation in humanist names may consist of translation from vernacular European languages, sometimes involving a playful element of punning. Such names could be a cover for humble social origins.

Latinisation or Latinization could refer to:

Biology

In the USSR, latinisation (Russian: латиниза́ция latinizatsiya) was the name of the campaign during the 1920s–1930s which aimed to replace traditional writing systems for numerous languages with systems that would use the Latin script or to create Latin-script based systems for languages that did not have a writing system. Almost all Turkic, Iranian, Uralic and several other languages were romanized, totaling nearly 50 of the 72 written languages in the USSR. There also existed plans to romanize Russian and other Slavonic languages as well, but in the late 1930s the latinisation campaign was canceled, and all newly romanized languages were converted to Cyrillic.

The following languages were romanised or adapted new Latin-script alphabets: