DIN 31635 is a

Deutsches Institut für Normung ' (DIN; in English, the German Institute for Standardisation Registered Association) is the German national organization for standardization and is the German ISO member body. DIN is a German Registered Association ('' e.V.'') headquartered ...

(DIN) standard for the

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the

Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft The Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (, ''German Oriental Society''), abbreviated DMG, is a scholarly organization dedicated to Oriental studies, that is, to the study of the languages and cultures of the Near East and the Far East, the broa ...

(DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-based systems were doing away with '' j'', because it stood for in the English-speaking world and for in the German-speaking world and the entire absence of digraphs like ''th, dh, kh, gh, sh''. Its acceptance relies less on its official status than on its elegance (one sign for each Arabic letter) and the ''Geschichte der arabischen Literatur'' manuscript catalogue of

Carl Brockelmann Carl Brockelmann (17 September 1868 – 6 May 1956) German Semiticist, was the foremost orientalist of his generation. He was a professor at the universities in Breslau, Berlin and, from 1903, Königsberg. He is best known for his multi-volum ...

and the dictionary of

Hans Wehr Hans Bodo Gerhardt Wehr (; 5 July 1909, Leipzig24 May 1981, Münster) was a German Arabist. A professor at the University of Münster from 1957–1974, he published the ''Arabisches Wörterbuch'' (1952), which was later published in an Engl ...

. Today it is used in most German-language publications of Arabic and Islamic studies.

Table

:The 28 letters:

Rules

The ' (', ' and ') are transliterated as ', ' and '. A ' results in a

geminate In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...

(consonant written twice). The article is written with the

sun letters In Arabic and Maltese, the consonants are divided into two groups, called the sun letters or solar letters ( ar, حروف شمسية ', mt, konsonanti xemxin) and moon letters or lunar letters (Arabic: ', mt, konsonanti qamrin), based on wh ...

assimilated. An ' marking is transliterated as '. The letter () ' is transliterated as word-final ' normally, or ' in a word in the

construct state In Afro-Asiatic languages, the first noun in a genitive phrase of a possessed noun followed by a possessor noun often takes on a special morphological form, which is termed the construct state (Latin ''status constructus''). For example, in Arabi ...

. ' has many variants, ; depending on its position, all of them are transliterated as . The initial ' () without a ' isn't transliterated using initially, only the initial vowel is transliterated (if pronounced): ''.'' () ' appears as '','' transliterating it indistinguishable from ''.'' for final is also known as ' "flexible '". Long vowels and are transliterated as ' and ''.'' The ' suffix appears as ' although the former is normally transliterated as ', and

nunation Nunation ( ar, تَنوِين, ' ), in some Semitic languages such as Literary Arabic, is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics (''ḥarakāt'') to a noun or adjective. This is used to indicate the word ends in an alveolar nasal without ...

is ignored in transliteration. A hyphen ' is used to separate

clitic In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...

s (the article, the prepositions and the conjunction) from words to which they are attached. The

Eastern Arabic numerals The Eastern Arabic numerals, also called Arabic-Hindu numerals or Indo–Arabic numerals, are the symbols used to represent numerical digits in conjunction with the Arabic alphabet in the countries of the Mashriq (the east of the Arab world) ...

() are rendered as western

Arabic numerals Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers such a ...

().

Notes

References

*
Reprint (Wiesbaden, 1969)

External links

Chart of Arabic transliteration systems (non-normative), including DIN 31635
Revision 2.2 (2008-02-25)
Deutsches Institut für Normung
{{Deutsches Institut für Normung Romanization of Arabic 31635

Table

Rules

See also

Notes

References

External links