Do Arabic speakers typically use allah when referring to a god other than the god of Abraham? Let’s say an Arabic speaker is discussing Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, Thor, or Vishnu. Would the word allah be used to describe those deities?
No. Allah refers to the One God. It is the definite form. The Jewish expression is basically identical.
The word ilah is used (lah), as in the shahada, lā ʾilāha ʾillā-allāh - لا إله إلا الله.
The relationship between the words is clear enough even in the latin characters.
So what is the arabic word for god (not The One True God)? Are you saying it’s “la”? (Not everyone here is going to know what “the shahada” is.)
It is clear?
Allah is more or less clearly the definite contraction of Al-ilaha although theologically it is sometimes claimed otherwise by the certain types of exaggerated piety.
I note I did not use “one true god”
It wasn’t clear, which is why I asked. BTW, spell check changed my “lah” to “la”.
What is the difference between “ilah” and “lah”?
If we were to write, in arabic, “They worshipped a god called Kali”, what specific word would be used for “god” in that sentence?
Ilah. (ʾilāha / إله)
The opening of the shahada is literally if I write it in the English, “There is no god but God”
Got it. Thanks!
Thank you for the replies 
While my guess is that these are the same word and the difference is grammatical, I’d love an authoritative answer.
The “i” which is the kasrah for me, in the Ilah is carried by the hamzah, I was just showing the related roots of the word.
Yeah, but does it rock the Kasbah? 
BTW, Ramira, I doubt that more than a handful of people here know what “kasrah” or “hamzah” means.
Its difficult to convert Arabic (or Urdu, Persian or Turkish) spelling into Latin, but here is how the words are written.
Ilah: in Arabic. :إله
Allah in Arabic: الله
Suffice to say, they are spelt and pronounced differently and misunderstanding is unlikely for anyone with anything resembling fluency.
The hamzah is a character in the writing representing a pause sound, but we do not think of it as a real letter of the alphabet. It is ‘weak’ and tends to be assimilated.
Kasrah is just the vowel sound that is like “i” although in some of the dialects more like “e”
For those of you following at home;Arabic Diacritics.
If you are wondering; Diacritic
Thanks!
As one who had no idea what the terms mean, I am glad I learned something today.
Are there multiple possible characters for the hamzah?
the hamzah is a character, I don’t understand the question.
The hamzah is a glottal stop and usually transliterated in English as an apostrophe. I am not an Arabic speaker (my wife is) but it is one character used as a diacritic which can appear above or below a letter. It can appear anywhere in a word, including before the first letter or after the last.
In Urdu (which also has the hamza) we were always taught that it is not a letter,rather a character which changes the sound of a letter. Which of course has the added complication that half the time, a hamza is silent in Urdu.
Yes. It is how I think of it. It is a character but not a real letter. And it is weak so even in many of the spoken dialects it often disappears or gets swallowed… so I guess that the Urdu is not treating it so differently from the actual modern speech.