Edit: Latin letters and numbers might not be the right word. I meant letters such as AaBbCc and numbers such as 123.
In: 3829
Numbers are not “latin”, they are universal
[Example of a Menu in Japan](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/WAB0N7/japan-honshu-tokyo-noodle-restaurant-window-menu-30076333-WAB0N7.jpg)
edit: since some people misunderstood my comment, i meant they are universal, as in, used worldwide, and not a latin-script exclusive
They do use them. It’s just that unlike some other languages it’s not uncommon to some times see numbers written out, usually small, whole numbers, since they have characters for them. It would be like writing “coffee, two dollars” on a menu instead of “2 dollars”.
Latin letters or Arabic numbers? Well, Arabic numbers are universally adopted, and the Latin alphabet is just more easily distinguishable at a distance. They do have a city or province marked with a Chinese character.
You mean the Arabic numerals? Because they are pretty much globally understood. As for Latin alphabet, it is widely used and simple enough but they are not used in Japan for example at all.
In terms of license plates, there is another reason: OCR technology.
Roads are filled with cameras tracking every car by license plate… And it’s way easier for cameras to detect “standart” letters and numbers
It’s part of [Geneva Convention (another one)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Convention_on_Road_Traffic).
It’s worldwide standard on how you make plate numbers and classify vehicles, so any vehicle and driver license can be recognized internationally.
Ukraine, for example, uses only letters that look same in both Latin and Cyrillic, so plates can be read in both languages.
<People’s> Republic of China officially uses Latin alphabet in their official phonetic alphabet called Pinyin. Here’s a sample:
Zhùyīn fúhào
Ignore the accent marks, they are tone marks. Pinyin appears on highway signs in big cities for people who can’t read the characters (or can’t read them fast enough.) Also, many Chinese use Pinyin to type characters into their mobile phones: Sugo Pinyin or Google Pinyin are popular.
Taiwan uses the same phonetic system but did not adopt the Latin Alphabet. Here’s an example:
ㄓㄨˋ ㄧㄣ ㄈㄨˊ ㄏㄠˋ
So I wouldn’t quite say the Chinese “don’t use Latin Alphabet.” Many mainland Chinese do use Latin Alphabet or at least see it quite a bit in daily life.
Edit: There is a Latin letter based version of South Korean writing! That one, however, nobody likes. The Korean Alphabet called Hangul was designed to be easy to learn and read so everyone prefers Hangul. I taught myself the basics in 30 minutes. I don’t speak Korean. However, in Seoul and other big cities on subways and stuff, you will also see the Latin Alphabet used to help foreigners out. So, many Koreans will also see Latin Alphabet quite a bit in daily life.
Here is Hangul and Romanized, saying the same thing:
한글이 좋다/hangeul-i johda
China uses Arabic numerals at times. For example, the current year in Chinese is 二零二三 but it’s often going to be written 2023. Prices are pretty much always in Arabic numerals (eg 25元）. Using Arabic numerals on a license plate for simplicity (instead of allowing thousands of characters) makes sense and is easy to read for people.
Latin letters are used less often (in most cases, Chinese characters are used even to write foreign words) but most people know the letters because pinyin is used to enter Chinese on a keyboard (and just for showing pronunciation in general). For example, 北京 is Beijing.
By the way, Chinese license plates also include a single Chinese character on the left indicating the province. This is accompanied by a letter indicating the city, with A usually being the capital city. These characters are interesting because they are often traditional names for the region. For example, Hunan is 湘 xiang (also the name for Hunan cuisine, 湘菜) and Guangdong is 粵 yue (which is also Cantonese cuisine).
When I was in Greece, I noticed that license plates only use letters which exist in both the Greek and Roman alphabets.
Arabic numerals (0123456789) are used pretty much universally throughout the world for these types of things. It is for the same reason the USA doesn’t use the words “one” or “eight” on license plates.
In South Korea (where I’m living right now), they don’t use the english alphabet on their license plates. They use Hangeul (the korean alphabet). It is also phonetic and serves the same purpose.
I can not speak to Chinese license plates, but if they do use the english alphabet, then it is probably because Chinese does not use a phonetic alphabet. Therefore it makes sense to use the english alphabet.
Japanese also has a phonetic alphabet they can use (Hiragana). It looks like they use that on their license plates and not the english alphabet or Kanji.
Edit: You do see the english alphabet used in various other registrations, though. This will almost certainly be true for any information that might need to be valid internationally or on international software. Passport numbers, IDs, driver licenses, postal reference codes, etc. As near as I can tell, that is simply due to the dominance of english in international communication.
Edit 2: Another commenter on this post pointed out the Geneva conventions on road traffic, which specify license plates requirements for vehicles to travel between countries. These requirements include the use of Arabic numerals and Latin characters. However, South Korea and Japan are both effectively islands and don’t need to worry about cars in their country driving across the border into other countries. China is not a signatory to these conventions.
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