Why does the English alphabet only have 26 letters?

Answer 1

the reason this is because the English language came from England and England had 26 letters.

English is an amalgam of several languages, Latin and German among them. Most of the 26 letters came from Latin but some, such as J and K, came from other languages.

Answer 2

Sometimes the question is much better than the answer. The English alphabet is a antecedent to the Greek alphabet. What is interesting in this is that the symbols used as letters do not correspond with phonemes at 1:1 Which is probably why spelling mistakes are so hard to avoid.

Answer 3

Every written language has at least enough symbols to effectively write. Some Alphabets have more symbols, because of tradition or because of the evolution of the language.

English has 26 letters because that was the exact number of necessary letters in the 17th Century, which was the last time the alphabet was modified.

Answer 4

The number of letters in an alphabet is arbitrary, it depends on how many sounds are present in the spoken language. The English alphabet has 26, the Russian, Greek, Korean, and other alphabets have others not present in English. Many alphabets which are basically the same as the English, modify some letters with accents. Even English has sounds produced by diphthongs (two letters sounded together) and letters which have disappeared like thorn (Þ, þ) which represented the dyphthong "th"

Answer 5

Because the twenty-six letters in the alphabet are the only letters used in English and we don't use any more like "é" and we don't use any less.

Answer 6

The alphabet has twenty six letters because that is how the beginning English speaking people spoke, using twenty six letters.

Answer 7

Actually there is 26 letters in the English alphabet.

Answer 8

Different Alphabets have different numbers of letters. The English alphabet has only 26 letters.