Is there an online resource that show which languages share the same alphabets?

Question

Recently I've been to Russia and therefore decided to learn how to read the Cyrillic alphabet. After that I discovered that the Cyrillic alphabet is also used in other languages, like Belorussian or Bulgarian. That was good, because my effort to learn a new alphabet could be used to learn also other additional languages I didn't expect to. If I knew that beforehand, could be a reason to decide to learn one of those languages.

My question is: is there any (online) resource showing which language share the same (or, perhaps, similar) alphabets?

Languages don't share alphabets, writing systems do. Many languages (even English) have multiple writing systems, — Flimzy, Apr 12 '16 at 05:49
@user3169, perhaps I'll ask in Meta if resource questions are on/off topic? — gmauch, Apr 12 '16 at 12:47
In most cases learning of the alphabet is the easiest part of learning language (I'm not sure about languages with enormous alphabet - Japan or Chinese for example) — Schullz, Apr 12 '16 at 20:28
@Schullz: If you're talking about the traditional Japanese and Chinese scripts, they don't use alphabets. — Flimzy, Apr 13 '16 at 05:59
Related meta post: http://meta.languagelearning.stackexchange.com/q/160/13 — Flimzy, Apr 13 '16 at 06:10
@Schullz: They're generally called Logograms. Writing systems generally "can be placed into broad categories such as alphabets, syllabaries, or logographies." source — Flimzy, Apr 13 '16 at 08:52

score 11 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:52

Omniglot.com is a good resource to look at for writing systems and for getting general information about various languages. They have an Index of languages by writing system.

There's also the Wikipedia page List of languages by writing system, as pointed out by user3169.

That said, if you're just looking for which languages share a particular writing system, you can always just look up that writing system specifically, either on Omniglot, Wikipedia, or somewhere else.

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 04 '16 at 20:57

First of all, it is important to point out that an alphabet is just one type of writing system, and that not all writing systems are alphabets. Other types of writing systems include:

abjads (only consonants, possibly with optional vowel marks; see Arabic and Hebrew),
abugidas or alphasyllabaries (each "unit" represents a consonant-vowel sequence, and vowel notation is secondary; e.g. Devanagari and other Indic scripts),
syllabaries (e.g. katakana in Japanese),
logographic systems (e.g. Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji).

The two main resources that group languages by writing system are the following:

List of languages by writing system on Wikipedia. This article lists writing systems in alphabetical order; for each writing system, its lists the languages that use it in alphabetical order.
Index of languages by writing system on Omniglot. This page uses a different type of grouping than the Wikipedia article: it first provides an index to writing systems used to write more than one language, followed by an index to writing systems used to write one language. These two indexes are followed by the alphabetical list of writing systems. In contrast to the Wikipedia article, each writing systems is illustrated with a small image.

None of the above resources try to group the writing systems genetically/historically (which would not be possible for many cases anyway) or typologically (alphabets, abjads, etc.; see above), nor do they identify languages that are written in more than one writing systems (e.g. due to them being spoken in different countries).

Is there an online resource that show which languages share the same alphabets?

2 Answers2