Is there a collective word for the different "alphabets" used by different languages?

Question

As I believe "alphabet" refers specifically to the latin a-z, is there a term that collectively refers to all collections of writing characters. ie, if I had a list that contained the entries "Latin, Kanji, Cyrillic" etc, what would that list be called? A single word is preferable, as I need the term to describe such a list in software I'm writing.

Note the answer is not "language" - eg English, French, German etc are all languages, but all use the Latin alphabet. On the other hand, Japanese is a language that can be written using Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana and Latin 'systems'. It's a hypernym for these 'systems' I'm after, not the languages.

Answer 1

Alphabet is the correct word.

As I believe "alphabet" refers specifically to the latin a-z

Your assumption is wrong.

The etymological origin of the word "alphabet" relates to the Greek alphabet, in which the first two characters are "alpha" and "beta".

However, "alphabet" is currently used for any comprehensive set of characters. Take note of definition 1.1, which shows you that it can be used more loosely and does not even need to refer to a linguistic character set.

Alphabet
noun

1. A set of letters or symbols in a fixed order used to represent the basic set of speech sounds of a language, especially the set of letters from A to Z.
   ‘the first letter of the alphabet’
   ‘a phonetic alphabet’

   1.1. The basic elements in a system which combine to form complex entities.
   ‘DNA's 4-letter alphabet’

The OED does mention that it can be taken to refer to the A-Z alphabet, but not exclusively.

---

Tangentially

You've somewhat answered your own question. From your question body:

English, French, German etc are all languages, but all use the Latin alphabet.

If you assume that "alphabet" inherently refers to the Latin A-Z, then why didn't you say:

English, French, German etc are all languages, but all use the alphabet.

The fact that you have to say "the Latin alphabet" contradicts your notion that "alphabet" always refers to the Latin A-Z. That would make "Latin alphabet" a pleonasm.
Needing to specify which alphabet means that there is more than one alphabet.

Answer 2

I tend to follow Omniglot and call them writing systems. This is because Omniglot - and I believe linguistics generally - uses different terms depending on certain characteristics of the writing system and how it represents sounds of the language. For example, English, French, Greek, Korean hangul, and Russian are written with alphabets; Hindi, Bengali, and Gujarati are written with abugidas; Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Farsi, and Urdu are written with abjads; Japanese kana, Cherokee, and Canadian Aboriginal writing are called syllabaries; and Japanese kanji, Korean hanja, and Chinese hànzì are ideograms.

To touch briefly on the differences:

• An alphabet represents consonants and vowels each separately as individual letters.
• An abjad represents consonants only as distinct letters; vowels are represented as diacritics. In some cases, the vowels may be omitted entirely, and are implied from context (Hebrew does this quite often).
• An abugida represents consonants as separate letters, but the glyph used also implies a “default” vowel, and deletion or change of vowel is represented with modifications of the glyph, in a fashion similar to diacritics, but not the same.
• A syllabary represents a syllable of the language - usually but not invariably in the form CV (consonant followed by vowel) - as a single glyph; there is no necessary relationship between glyphs that carry the same consonant, or the same vowel.
• Ideograms use a single - often complex - glyph to represent a word or concept. In some languages, the ideogram may actually be compound, with one portion signalling the pronunciation, and another portion signalling the meaning.

Answer 3

The Unicode standard, and ISO 15924: Codes for the representation of names of scripts use the term script.

So, there is the Latin script, the Han script (which contains the Chinese hànzì / Japanese kanji / Korean hanza), the Cyrillic script, ...

In Unicode parlance, a script is a "set of letters that are used together in writing languages" ^{[Unicode §2.2]}, while a writing system^* is "the way a particular language is written" ^{[Unicode §6.1]}, which can involve several scripts, e.g. "the modern Japanese writing system uses four scripts: Han ideographs, Hiragana, Katakana and Latin (Romaji)" ^{[Unicode §6.1 again]}.

The interested reader may also refer to Unicode Standard Annex #24: Unicode Script Property.

---

^* In Unicode, writing system can also refer to "a way that families of scripts may be classified by how they represent the sounds or words of human language"^{[Unicode §6.1]}, namely alphabets, abjads, syllabaries, logosyllabaries.

Answer 4

You may use character(s) or character set.

As you mention about alphabet, I assume your question is about classification of "writing system" according to relation between "sound unit" and "graphic representation".

Languages may use writing systems by implementing different set of characters. Usual process is to connect "sound unit" to a "graph". they may use alphabet at the phoneme level or syllabemes at syllable level or logograph at the word level. These are different types of characters that are used to connect sound unit to graphs

Please check these: wiki page for logograph , for alphabet, for Grapheme and a page from Western Washington University

OED: Character:

3 a. A member of a set of symbols used in writing or printing to represent linguistic elements, as individual speech sounds, syllables, or words; any of the simple elements of a written language, as a letter of an alphabet, or an ideogram.

1490 W. Caxton tr. Boke yf Eneydos vi. sig. Bviij The Fenyces were the fyrst Inuentours of carecteris [Fr. carrecteres] dyfferencyng that one fro that other, of whiche were fourmed lettres for to write.

1837 Penny Cycl. VII. vii. 32 The Chinese characters or written words are symbols of ideas.

1851 D. Wilson Archæol. & Prehistoric Ann. Scotl. iv. iv. 535 The Runic characters mingling with the initials and pilgrims' marks of the Holy Isle.

1910 Catholic Encycl. IX. 685/1 Many of the priests..use Arabic instead, but Arabic written in Syriac characters.

1952 ABA Jrnl. Oct. 837/2 The page..is neatly written in characters so small that a reader with average eyesight needs the aid of a magnifying glass in deciphering it.

2009 B. Mayhew & J. Bindloss Trekking in Nepal Himalaya 412/2 Each of these sounds is a different letter or character in the Devanagari script used to write Nepali.

Answer 5

Another term that covers alphabets, syllabaries, ideographic scripts and so on, is “writing system.” Some sources (including Wikipedia) consider the collection of glyphs the “script” and each method of using a script to write a language a “writing system.” By this definition, the use of simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Pinyin, Wade-Giles and Bopomofo to write Mandarin are all different “writing systems,” and the use of Latin script to write German and Vietnamese are different writing systems too.

Answer 6

As I believe 'alphabet' refers specifically to the Latin a - z.

Your belief is wrong.

The alphabet, just by its name, is related to ancient semitic origins, the traces of which remains in Hebrew, for example, the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet is Aleph & Beth, and so, alphabet. But it's origin goes even further back to Proto-Canaanite, also known as the Phoenician alphabet and influenced the alphabets of Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew & Latin.

Further, the term - alphabet - in it's modern meaning means simply all the basic written symbols - known as letters or graphemes - used in a language that uses these symbols to represent a phoneme.

Thus the collective name for a collection of alphabets is 'alphabets' - like I have already used in this sentence.

if I had a list containing 'Latin, Kanji, Cyrillic', what would that list be called?

Whilst both Latin and Cyrillic use alphabets, Kanji is logographic; hence to refer to the list above, one would say, alphabets and logographies.

All writing systems come under alphabets, syllabaries, logographies and ideograms. Some used mixed systems like the Japanese where they have both a syllabary and a logography; in Chinese, they use a fusion of a syllabary and a logography and ancient Egyptian heiroglyphic is ideogrammatic. There is no one word to cover them all.

If you wish to use a term that covers all of them, its best to use an invented term for this. For example, alis, which is an acronym of alphabet, logogram, ideogram and syllabary. The other option is to choose one of these to represent all of them. Semantically speaking the best one to choose is ideograms since all 'letters' originated from such.

Answer 7

Most answers are correct as far as they go. Alphabets are individual characters or character sets that in themselves have no meaning. In the case of Kanji the symbols are ideograms and each one holds meaning within itself, or put another way, is a word or concept. Even though Kanji can be put together to form other words or concepts this is a totally different process and concept than the letters of an alphabet. Katakana and Hiragana are alphabets as each symbol represents a sound and not an idea.