Is there a collective word for the different "alphabets" used by different languages?
Solution 1:
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.
Solution 2:
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.
Solution 3:
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.