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So, I read about the Irish alphabet once, and there was a phrase saying that "V" occurs in a few native words like "vácarnach" which means to quack in English. Shouldn't the letter V be in the alphabet then if it occurs in some native words?

Sir Cornflakes
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Akshat Goswami
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    To all intents and purposes, v is part of the modern Irish alphabet. Back when Irish was written in the Cló Gaelach, the letters j, k, q, v, w, x, y and z where all very rare (frequently no types were even cut for these letters). The very few native words (all onomatopoetic) that contain v would be written with ḃ (bh) instead, like ḃácarnach or ḃrác. Since the language officially switched to the Roman script, the number of loan words using the ‘non-native’ letters has risen steadily, and j, v and z can now easily be considered part of the alphabet. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 03 '22 at 15:17

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What it means for a letter to be "in" an alphabet is in fact quite arbitrary, and often comes down to the views of the people writing the textbooks or the Unicode proposals (which might be the government or might be some independent group).

For example, some English-speakers use spelling to distinguish "coop" (where you keep chickens) from "co-op" or "coöp" (a cooperatively owned business). Shouldn't that mean ö and - are English letters, since they're used to distinguish well-attested English words? Perhaps, but most people wouldn't consider them such, even as they use them in their own writing. I've certainly never heard English-speaking children sing "hyphen" or "dash" in the alphabet song.

Conversely, & used to be considered a letter of the English alphabet. It no longer is, for pretty much arbitrary reasons; now it's a punctuation mark instead, and we no longer list it after Z when saying the alphabet, even though its function hasn't changed.

Draconis
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    Irish is an excellent example of this arbitrariness: although the ‘traditional alphabet’ often quoted (though always without an actual source as to what makes it ‘traditional’ for Modern Irish) excludes j, q, v, k, z, etc., by far the most influential dictionary, Niall Ó Dónaill’s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla (1977), contains separate letter entries for all of them except k. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 03 '22 at 14:58
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    Welsh also provides an illustration of arbitrariness for its inclusion of what, to English-speakers, appear to be digraphs as individual letters (ch, dd, ff, ng, ll, ph, rh, & th are all considered individual letters, although curiously mh, ngh, and nh are not) – Tristan Nov 03 '22 at 15:33
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    @Tristan For Welsh, is really the odd one out. Granted, it’s still found in a very small number of Greek loan words (which used to be larger) as an alternative to , but apart from that, it pairs with in only being found in aspirate mutation. If the Welsh alphabet were settled upon now, would probably not be in it. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 03 '22 at 17:02
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    I don't think I would call "&" a punctuation mark, as it's simply an abbreviation for a single word. – chepner Nov 04 '22 at 12:50
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    The & symbol is a h&y shorth&. If English speakers had exp&ed its use beyond a single word, its st&ing as a st&ard "letter" may not have been ab&oned. – dan04 Nov 04 '22 at 16:18
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    ...W, X, Y, &, Z.... – user3067860 Nov 04 '22 at 17:09
  • FWIW: When I was a kid, some 40 years ago, W was not part of the Swedish alfabet. But I believe it was before. And I believe it is today, so now we are back to 29 letters. Come to think of it, Ä is a letter of its own in Sweden but and A with an umlaut in Germany. I believe ẞ is simply a double s and sorted so. Ll and ñ, in Spanish is a letter or not, can't remember. They are sorted one way but is another letter. IFAK. – LosManos Nov 05 '22 at 10:02