I raise the question, what does the telephone dial look like in areas
> with alphabets different fron our own, such as Cairo, Egypt, or
> Beijing, China, or Oslo, Norway? Before the time of dial phones, how
> did operators communicate with multi lengual populations?.
It's my understanding that the addition of letters on the dial is mostly an American thing, and European phones don't generally have them at all. I expect this is similar in most of the countries you mention, although I found a web page that mentioned that Russian phones used to have cyrillic letters on them, but they don't any more.