local variable 'l' referenced before assignment...

[ichabod801]

Also, take a look at how much code you're repeating. That's just a recipe for errors. I would put all the letters in a dict:

letters = {letter: 0 for letter in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'}

Then you can loop over the letters and do the count update code once. You can also pass the dict as a parameter to your functions, solving the problem that sparkz_alot pointed out.