why do countries such as South Korea and China have latin numbers and letters on their license plates when their language doesn’t use them?

Question

Edit: Latin letters and numbers might not be the right word. I meant letters such as AaBbCc and numbers such as 123.

In: 3829

Answer 1

Elements of the language tend to follow technology or any other cultural trade or cultural phenomenon as it travels around the world.

Many places import Latin letters and Arabic numerals when they bring in technology developed from places which use Latin letters and Arabic numerals. You won’t find them in old ancient cultural texts, practices, etc. However, cars and license plates aren’t part of ancient Chinese or Korean culture. The license plates are one small part of vehicle technology which they imported. Numbers on a keypad, phone, computers, for most mathematics, all use Arabic numbers. Latin letters are peppered throughout general media and used in various ways (ex A, ex B, ex C, etc), but they are widely known for names of companies and organizations (google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, UN, UNESCO, etc). These are not unknown elements to them, just like western scientists use a lot of foreign terms like Latin in classification systems, etc.

We can ask similar questions like why do we use Roman numerals in our movies, or latin abbreviations for things like pound.