Non-English languages that use the 26 letters used in English

Eris Alar

Hi, a board game design friend asked me if it was possible to use an English Scrabble set and play in a language that is not English. Are there any, or many, languages that use the 26 letters that are used in English enough that playing a game like Scrabble is possible? Thanks

Vasil Stanev

https://omniglot.com/writing/indonesian.htm

Jens Kutilek

For German, in some kinds of games like crossword puzzles, etc., usually those German letters are substituted:

Ä → AE
Ö → OE
Ü → UE
ß  → SS

Scrabble has umlaut letters in Germany (and the rules forbid using AE, etc., to represent umlauts), but it might as well be played substituting the letters as shown above.

When I scan a font containing only A-Z and a-z with my own orthography support tool, it reports those 35 orthographies as supported:

Asu

Bemba

Bena

Chiga

Cornish

English

Gusii

Indonesian

Kalenjin

Kinyarwanda

Low Saxon

Luo

Luyia

Machame

Makhuwa-Meetto

Makonde

Malay

Morisyen

North Ndebele

Nyankole

Oromo

Rombo

Rundi

Rwa

Samburu

Sangu

Shambala

Shona

Soga

Somali

Swahili

Taita

Teso

Vunjo

Zulu

Christian Thalmann

Of course, if you play German Scrabble with an English set, the letters will have the wrong weights...

(Then again, the Y bearing 10 points in German usually leads to someone playing NY, MY, or EY for 51 points once a game...)

(Any WordFeud players here?)

Johannes Neumeier

Scrabble-nerd note: The value of letters in the English version Scrabble is based on the frequency of those letters in English!

KP Mawhood

Given that there are 100 tiles in a scrabble set, you'd need a language with a very similar letter frequency (small differences would unfairly impact overall gameplay).

E.g. According to this study (pp.27–9), Swedish has a relatively strong letter frequency correlation with English. But, this probably would not undo the advantage bestowed upon English-players when using an English Scrabble set. There are stark differences. For instance, Swedish Scrabble has separate tiles for Ä, Ö, and Å, while the letters Q and W are absent, but can be played with a blank (see Scrabble letter distributions).

Perhaps, some English-based creole languages?

Eris Alar

Thanks everyone, this is really helpful! :-)

André G. Isaak

Jens Kutilek said:

When I scan a font containing only A-Z and a-z with my own orthography support tool, it reports those 35 orthographies as supported:

Asu

(etc.)

The problem is many of these are supported with only A-Z and a-z because they use *less* than these 26 letters.

A Kinyarwanda speakers not going to have much use for an L and a Swahili speaker is certainly going to be stumped by a Q or X.

Sérgio Martins

Like others have mentioned, there are a few languages that the English alphabet could be used for (Afar comes to mind as a full A-Z).

However, to expand on Johannes' and Katy's points, Scrabble has different boards and different number of letters, based on letter frequency for a given language, which would make letters have different "drop" ratios (or "pull", as you pull them from the bag).

Daniel Benjamin Miller

You could play scrabble in Latin! Personally I would say I/J and U/V are acceptable distinctions to draw (and these are well sorted out for those who do distinguish between them). The letter W would not be used, however.

Laurensius Adi

Indonesian here!

Yes, we do have the exact same 26 letters that English use. But it will be a really tough challenge to play Scrabble in Indonesian, since most of our words are lot longer than English.

As @Johannes Neumeier said, it depends on the letter frequency. We'll need different letter sets.