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
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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:
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?
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.
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).
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.