Hindi or any Indic languages (popular ones) have any case differentiation.

Mostly because emphasis on any word is not literal it is tonal.

So there are these things called - matra (12 matras in hindi)

They are symbols representing inflection/emphasis etc. and we can combine them with each character of the alphabet and convey tone.

Japanese has no uppercase/lowercase. Italics (oblique type) is generally unused as a standard. Bolding can be used but uncommon in most writing. Underlining is commonly used for emphasis. Quotation marks are sometimes used to emphasize in the way “air quotes” would be. It’s rather antiquated but dots or Japanese commas above or beside (in vertical writing) can be used where italics might be used in English.

Sans-serif and serif have their equivalents in CJK langauges - in Japanese they are called Gothic and Mincho type respectively. With Gothic every line maintains the same width. Mincho uses the traditional standard where line widths vary according to each stroke, the rules are derived from how it was written by brush. Calligraphic writing takes this to an extreme and is more of an art-form on special paper, depending on your intent you can follow the traditional rules or be a bit more creative.

Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters?

Greek has upper and lower case. From mathematics/physics you may have come across e.g. the ones for sigma (Σ, σ). Cyrillic also has them; most look the same between the upper & lower case variants, just bigger/smaller (Л, л), but there are some that differ (А, а).

I don’t think most Asian scripts have letter cases. Javanese script does have upper case but only for a small subset of letters and they are generally not used anymore.

What about serif or sans-serif?

Cyrillic and Greek, yes. There are also equivalents to the serif and sans-serif typefaces in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean typography.

How do they show emphasis?

On the Web, boldface (but not italics) is very commonly used across various writing systems. Obviously no all caps for those without capital letters.

Thai does not have upper case letters.

It does have a character that essentially means duplicate the previous word which is a common way to pluralize or emphasize:

Child = เด็ก “dèk”
Children = เด็กเด็ก or เด็กๆ “dèkdèk”

Pretty = งาม “ngaam”
Pretty! = งามงาม or งามๆ “ngaamngaam”

There’s no capitalization in written Chinese.

But there is a “upper case” for writing numbers. Its set of very complex characters meant for writing contracts so you can’t easily tamper with it.

Like “一” (one) could be easily changed to a “十” (ten) with just one stroke, but “壹” also means “one”, but you can’t add strokes to change it, any attempt at tampering with contracts/documents would be easily noticed. Usually this is never used in every-day life.

(Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_numerals#Ordinary_numerals)

It’s not really “capitalization” but more like writing “One Thousand Dollars” instead of “$1000”

Idk what you mean by “emphasis”, but there is no difference between proper nouns and common nouns. I mean, there is italics and bold if written digitally. Or underlining it if written on paper.

(I’m Chinese-American btw)

Korean does not. BUT, we, sometimes and almost exclusively online, use whitespace(plus exclamation mark) between each characters to emphasize.

망했다 -> 망 했 다!

Japanese has three alphabets (and the English alphabet… and those Arabic numbers we are all familiar with)

• Hiragana (ひらがな) for native words, grammar, and morphology - it reminds me of cursive
• Katakana (カタカナ) it gives an unmistakable clue you are reading a foreign word - but can also be used for emphasis
• Kanji (漢字) borrows Chinese characters that can be read with native or borrowed sounds, but generally with the same meaning

Given those and the English letters at your fingertips they have a lot of tools to give context. Grab a newspaper or Manga sometime, even if you don’t know the words you can tell each writing system apart pretty easily.

None of Chinese Japanese, Korean, Arabic or Hebrew have an uppercase. I believe the Cyrillic alphabet does. That’s Russian Serbian etc.

Serif and sans serif is not about emphasis? Its pretty much just design and can be included in pretty much any script. The claim used to be that there was a difference in reading speed bw the two but thats not true. Thats not a linguistic feature but a design feature.

Now italics are tough in most non latin languages. In written form emphasis can be shown by font size, placement of words, color or even spacing.

I think I remember hearing about using a dot with some vertical Asian language to show emphasis too. (Was a Yt short so weak memory)

I can only answer for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) languages. Others have answered the first point, but on “showing emphasis”:

I can confirm that in modern, information-age CJK languages, people also use things like italic, boldface, and other equivalents not too different from English. Notably though the punctuation marks are distinct Unicode letters (they are all full-length instead of half-length) different from their Germanic/Romance counterparts; the Japanese quotation marks are probably the most fun example. As for font type… Chinese has a long evolution history so there are in fact a variety of fonts baked into its history, some of which are very cursed

If you are referring to pre-information-age… there is the concept of Isochrony on Wikipedia but I think it’s more for individual words. Emphasis can be shown by how you speak a language and stress certain words… but then CJK are all high-context languages so there are lots of nuances

Hebrew does not have capital letters. But it does have “cursive”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew . In Hebrew it’s usually just called “handwriting” (כתב, כתב יד) as opposed to “print” (דפוס). The letters don’t flow into each other like they do in Latin cursive. They’re just faster to write.

In Unicode, each letter has just a single code point: e.g. ק is Hebrew Letter Qof (U+05E7). If you want cursive, you use a cursive font, but it’s still the same character.

Some letters have a different final form: if they are the last letter in a word, they look different. These are encoded as different characters, for example: the final form of צ Hebrew Letter Tsadi (U+05E6) is ץ Hebrew Letter Final Tsadi (U+05E5). There is a separate key for it on the keyboard.

There’s also niqqud, which takes the job of vowels, but that’s a whole other can of worms and isn’t used in everyday writing. It’s only very rarely used to clarify an otherwise ambiguous word.

Cyrillic has upper & lower case, with accents on both. There are serif, sans, display and most weights as well as many other categories, just like in latin scripts. If by ‘emphasis’ you mean italic, yes, there is Italic, and it’s very different from the standard upper & lower case. Cyrillic Cursive is almost like another alphabet in Cyrillic.

Greek definitely has upper and lowercase. Arabic and Persian do as well, but also rules on glyphs (different letter-shapes based on proximate letter combinations), as well as small accents that change the pronunciations.

All have hand-written (cursive or calligraphy) vs typewritten variations, including fixed-width vs variable fonts.

Serifs are display attributes, mostly for latin alphabets. But greek lettering have had them too, albeit in subtle, light versions. The modern didone (thick) or slab serifs didn’t show up until 18th Century.

Speaking for the Arabic abjad: No, no and we don’t.

Follow up… Can you do mocking in Kanji or Arabic?

example: DoNt Do ThAt

Asian

The Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic and Hebrew alphabets are more similar to each other than to any south / southeast Asian alphabet. Chinese and Korean are completely unrelated to this alphabet family (which is of Egyptian origin), or to each other. Japanese has four scripts. So you’ll need to be a little more precise than ‘Asian’.

To answer your original question, Cyrillic and Greek have upper case, Arabic and Hebrew have cursive which is not exactly the same, and neither Chinese nor south Asian scripts have upper case.