linguistic tools
alphabets
Alphabets are an important part of the world's languages, though not all languages are written. There are plenty of languages that are spoken only and in fact, most languages used to be only verbal until methods of writing become easier and more accessible to everyone.
There are many different alphabets in the world. The one that I'm writing in now is the Latin alphabet. Many languages use the Latin Alphabet, including the vast majority of the Germanic languages, though some of them include letters that we don't have in English, such as accented letters in Spanish, French, and German, and letters like ð or "eth" that's used in Icelandic.
Other alphabets include:
The Cyrillic Alphabet which is used by Russian, Ukranian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Mongolian, and Serbian, among others.
The Greek Alphabet which is used by Greek.
The Arabic Alphabet which is used by Arabic.
The Hebrew Alphabet which is used by Hebrew.
The Chinese Alphabet which is used by Chinese.
The Kana Alphabet which is used by Japanese, Okinawan, Ainu, and Palauan.
The Armenian Alphabet which is used by Armenian.
The Hangul Alphabet which is used by Korean, Jeju, and Cia-Cia.
The Georgian Alphabet which is used by Georgian and other Kartvelian languages.
Information from the Alphabet Wikipedia page.
corpora
A corpora is a linguistic collection of text from a single language. Linguistic corpora are extremely helpful when studying patterns in language and doing research, especially historical research. Morphologists use corpora to see when words started becoming widely used in languages and historical linguists use corpora to research when languages started changing. The International Corpus of English contains varieties of English from around the world.
dictionaries
Dictionaries are collections of words, definitions, uses, and etymologies in a single language. Dictionaries are complied by lexicographers, who study how words are used and record their definitions. Contrary to popular belief, dictionaries are not the authority on words and they record words according to how they're used, not how they're "supposed" to be used. Just because a word is not in the dictionary (yet) does not mean that it's not a valid word. All words are made-up after all!
In fact, many dictionaries contain what are called mountweazels, which are "fake words" that are inserted into the dictionary to see if other lexicographers are copying the entries of that dictionary.