Romanization of Arabic
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken
Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
in the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles,
cataloging In library and information science, cataloging (American English, US) or cataloguing (British English, UK) is the process of creating metadata representing information resources, such as books, sound recordings, moving images, etc. Cataloging ...
Arabic language works,
language education Language education refers to the processes and practices of teaching a second language, second or foreign language. Its study reflects interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary approaches, usually including some applied linguistics. There are f ...
when used instead of or alongside the Arabic script, and representation of the language in scientific publications by linguists. These formal systems, which often make use of
diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
and non-standard Latin characters, are used in academic settings for the benefit of non-speakers, contrasting with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based
Arabic chat alphabet The Arabic chat alphabet, also known as ''Arabizi'', ''Arabeezi'', ''Arabish'', Franco-Arabic or simply Franco (from ) refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combinati ...
. Different systems and strategies have been developed to address the inherent problems of rendering various Arabic varieties in the Latin script. Examples of such problems are the symbols for Arabic
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s that do not exist in English or other
Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...
an languages; the means of representing the
Arabic definite article (, also Romanization of Arabic, romanized as ''el-'', ''il-'', and ''l-'' as pronounced in some varieties of Arabic), is the definite article in the Arabic language: a grammatical particle, particle (''ḥarf'') whose function is to render the ...
, which is always spelled the same way in written Arabic but has numerous pronunciations in the spoken language depending on context; and the representation of short vowels (usually ''i u'' or ''e o'', accounting for variations such as ''
Muslim Muslims () are people who adhere to Islam, a Monotheism, monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God ...
and Moslem'' or ''
Mohammed Muhammad (8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islam, he was a prophet who was divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, ...
, Muhammad and Mohamed'').


Method

Romanization is often termed "transliteration", but this is not technically correct.
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 → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
is the direct representation of foreign ''letters'' using Latin symbols, while most systems for romanizing Arabic are actually transcription systems, which represent the ''sound'' of the language, since short vowels and geminate consonants, for example, do not usually appear in Arabic writing. As an example, the following rendering “'” of is a transcription, indicating the pronunciation; an example transliteration would be '.


Romanization standards and systems

Principal standards and systems are:


Early Romanization

Early Romanization of the Arabic language was standardized in the various bilingual Arabic-European dictionaries of the 17–19th centuries: * Pedro de Alcalá, ''Vocabulista'', 1505. A Spanish-Arabic glossary in transcription only. Edward Lipiński, 2012
Arabic Linguistics: A Historiographic Overview
pages 32–33
* Valentin Schindler, ''Lexicon Pentaglotton: Hebraicum, Chaldicum, Syriacum, Talmudico-Rabbinicum, et Arabicum'', 1612. Arabic lemmas were printed in Hebrew characters. * Franciscus Raphelengius
''Lexicon Arabicum''
Leiden 1613. The first printed dictionary of the Arabic language in Arabic characters. * Jacobus Golius, ''Lexicon Arabico-Latinum'', Leiden 1653. The dominant Arabic dictionary in Europe for almost two centuries. * Georg Freytag, ''Lexicon Arabico-Latinum'', praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzubadiique et aliorum libris confectum I–IV, Halle 1830–1837 *
Edward William Lane Edward William Lane (17 September 1801 – 10 August 1876) was a British orientalist, translator and lexicographer. He is known for his ''Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians'' and the '' Arabic-English Lexicon,'' as well as his translati ...
, ''
Arabic–English Lexicon __NOTOC__ The ''Arabic–English Lexicon'' is an Arabic–English dictionary compiled by Edward William Lane (died 1876), It was published in eight volumes during the second half of the 19th century. It consists of Arabic words defined and expla ...
'', 8 vols, London-Edinburgh 1863–1893. Highly influential, but incomplete (stops at Kaf)


Mixed digraphic and diacritical

* BGN/PCGN romanization (1956). *
UNGEGN The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) is one of the nine expert groups of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and deals with the national and international standardization of geographical names. ...
(1972). United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, or "Variant A of the Amended Beirut System". Adopted from BGN/PCGN. **
IGN ''IGN'' is an American video gaming and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa district and is headed by its former e ...
System 1973 or "Variant B of the Amended Beirut System", that conforms to the French orthography and is preferred to the Variant A in French-speaking countries as in Maghreb and Lebanon. ** romanization (2007) is different from UNGEGN in two ways: (1) ظ is d͟h instead of z̧; (2) the cedilla is replaced by a sub-macron (_) in all the characters with the cedilla. *
ALA-LC ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
(first published 1991), from the
American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world. History 19th century ...
and the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
. This romanization is close to the romanization of the and Hans Wehr, which is used internationally in scientific publications by
Arabist An Arabist is someone, often but not always from outside the Arab world, who specialises in the study of the Arabic language and Arab culture, culture (usually including Arabic literature). Origins Arabists began in Al Andalus, medieval Muslim ...
s. ** IJMES, used by ''International Journal of Middle East Studies'', very similar to ALA-LC. ** EI, ''
Encyclopaedia of Islam The ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'' (''EI'') is a reference work that facilitates the Islamic studies, academic study of Islam. It is published by Brill Publishers, Brill and provides information on various aspects of Islam and the Muslim world, Isl ...
'' (1st ed., 1913–1938; 2nd ed., 1960–2005).


Fully diacritical

* DMG (', 1935), adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. **
DIN 31635 DIN 31635 is a (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-ba ...
(1982), developed by the German Institute for Standardization ('). ** Hans Wehr transliteration (1961, 1994), a modification to DIN 31635. ** EALL, ''Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics'' (edited by Kees Versteegh, Brill, 2006–2009). ** Spanish romanization, identical to DMG/DIN with the exception of three letters: ǧ > ŷ, ḫ > j, ġ > g. *
ISO 233 The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for romanization of Arabic script. It was supplemented by ISO 233-2 in 1993 which is specific for Arabic language. 1984 edition The table below shows the consonants for the Arabic langua ...
(1984), letter-to-letter; vowels are transliterated only if they are shown with diacritics, otherwise they are omitted. ** ISO 233-2 (1993), simplified transliteration; vowels are always shown. * BS 4280 (1968), developed by the
British Standards Institution The British Standards Institution (BSI) is the Standards organization, national standards body of the United Kingdom. BSI produces technical standards on a wide range of products and services and also supplies standards certification services ...
.


ASCII-based

* ArabTeX (since 1992) has been modelled closely after the transliteration standards ISO/R 233 and DIN 31635. * Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s), developed at ALPNET by Tim Buckwalter; does not require
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...
s. * Arabic chat alphabet: an ad hoc solution for conveniently entering Arabic using a Latin keyboard.


Comparison table

* Hans Wehr transliteration does not capitalize the first letter at the beginning of sentences nor in proper names. * The ''chat'' table is only a demonstration and is based on the spoken varieties which vary considerably from Literary Arabic on which the IPA table and the rest of the transliterations are based. * Review '' hamzah'' for its various forms. * Neither standard defines which
code point A code point, codepoint or code position is a particular position in a Table (database), table, where the position has been assigned a meaning. The table may be one dimensional (a column), two dimensional (like cells in a spreadsheet), three dime ...
to use for ' and '' ''. Appropriate Unicode points would be
modifier letter apostrophe The modifier letter apostrophe () is a letter found in Unicode encoding, used primarily for various glottal sounds. It was used for the apostrophe in early Unicode versions. Encoding The letter apostrophe is encoded at , which is in the ' ...
ʼ〉 and modifier letter turned commaʻ〉 (for the UNGEGN and BGN/PCGN) or modifier letter reversed commaʽ〉 (for the Wehr and Survey of Egypt System (SES)), all of which Unicode defines as letters. Often right and left single
quotation mark Quotation marks are punctuation marks used in pairs in various writing systems to identify direct speech, a quotation, or a phrase. The pair consists of an opening quotation mark and a closing quotation mark, which may or may not be the sam ...
s 〈⟩, ⟨⟩ are used instead, but Unicode defines those as punctuation marks, and they can cause compatibility issues. The glottal stop (') in these romanizations is not written word-initially. * In ''Encyclopaedia of Islam'' digraphs are underlined, that is t͟h, d͟j, k͟h, d͟h, s͟h, g͟h (or t̲h̲, d̲j̲, k̲h̲, d̲h̲, s̲h̲, g̲h̲). On the contrary the sequences may be romanized with middle dot as ''t·h'', ''k·h'', ''d·h'', ''s·h'' respectively in BGN/PCGN, with the prime symbol ''tʹh, kʹh, dʹh, sʹh'' respectively in ALA-LC. * In the original German edition of his dictionary (1952) Wehr used ǧ, ḫ, ġ for j, ḵ, ḡ respectively (that is all the letters used are equal to DMG/
DIN 31635 DIN 31635 is a (DIN) standard for the transliteration of the Arabic alphabet adopted in 1982. It is based on the rules of the (DMG) as modified by the International Orientalist Congress 1935 in Rome. The most important differences from English-ba ...
). The variant presented in the table is from the English translation of the dictionary (1961). * BGN/PCGN allows use of
underdot When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot refers to the glyphs "combining dot above" (, and "combining dot below" ( which may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in use in a variety of languages. Similar marks are ...
s instead of
cedilla A cedilla ( ; from Spanish language, Spanish ', "small ''ceda''", i.e. small "z"), or cedille (from French , ), is a hook or tail () added under certain letters (as a diacritic, diacritical mark) to indicate that their pronunciation is modif ...
. * ' and ' are traditionally written in Northwestern Africa as and , respectively, while the latter's dot is only added initially or medially. * In Egypt, Sudan, and sometimes in other regions, the standard form for final-'' '' is only (without dots) in handwriting and print, for both final and final . for the latter pronunciation, is called ' , 'flexible alif'. * The
sun and moon letters In Arabic and Maltese, all consonants are classified into two distinct groups known as sun letters ( ', ) and moon letters (Arabic: ', ) This distinction affects the way the definite article (equivalent to " the" in English) is assimilated ...
and hamzat waṣl pronunciation rules apply, although it is acceptable to ignore them. The UN system and ALA-LC prefer lowercase ''a'' and hyphens: ''al-Baṣrah, ar-Riyāḍ''; BGN/PCGN prefers uppercase ''A'' and no hyphens: ''Al Baṣrah, Ar Riyāḍ''. * The EALL suggests ẓ "in proper names" (volume 4, page 517). * ''BGN/PCGN'', ''UNGEGN'', ''ALA-LC'', and ''DIN 31635'' use a normal for when romanizing Egyptian names or toponyms that are expectedly pronounced with . * ''BGN/PCGN'', ''UNGEGN'', ''ALA-LC'', and ''DIN 31635'' use the French-based for in Francophone Arabic speaking countries in names and toponyms. * Nunation is ignored in all romanizations in names and toponyms.


Romanization issues

Any
romanization In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...
system has to make a number of decisions which are dependent on its intended field of application.


Vowels

One basic problem is that written Arabic is normally unvocalized; i.e., many of the
vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...
s are not written out, and must be supplied by a reader familiar with the language. Hence unvocalized Arabic writing does not give a reader unfamiliar with the language sufficient information for accurate pronunciation. As a result, a pure
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 → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
, e.g., rendering as , is meaningless to an untrained reader. For this reason, transcriptions are generally used that add vowels, e.g. . However, unvocalized systems match exactly to written Arabic, unlike vocalized systems such as Arabic chat, which some claim detracts from one's ability to spell.


Transliteration vs. transcription

Most uses of romanization call for transcription rather than
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 → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...
: Instead of transliterating each written letter, they try to reproduce the sound of the words according to the orthography rules of the target language: ''Qaṭar''. This applies equally to scientific and popular applications. A pure transliteration would need to omit vowels (e.g. ''qṭr''), making the result difficult to interpret except for a subset of trained readers fluent in Arabic. Even if vowels are added, a transliteration system would still need to distinguish between multiple ways of spelling the same sound in the Arabic script, e.g. ' vs. ' for the sound ', and the six different ways () of writing the
glottal stop The glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many Speech communication, spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic ...
(
hamza The hamza ( ') () is an Arabic script character that, in the Arabic alphabet, denotes a glottal stop and, in non-Arabic languages, indicates a diphthong, vowel, or other features, depending on the language. Derived from the letter '' ʿayn'' ( ...
, usually transcribed '). This sort of detail is needlessly confusing, except in a very few situations (e.g., typesetting text in the Arabic script). Most issues related to the romanization of Arabic are about transliterating vs. transcribing; others, about what should be romanized: * Some transliterations ignore assimilation of the
definite article In grammar, an article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" ...
'' al-'' before the " sun letters", and may be easily misread by non-Arabic speakers. For instance, "the light" ''an-nūr'' would be more literally transliterated along the lines of ''alnūr''. In the transcription ''an-nūr'', a hyphen is added and the unpronounced removed for the convenience of the uninformed non-Arabic speaker, who would otherwise pronounce an , perhaps not understanding that in ''nūr'' is
geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (; from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), or consonant lengthening, is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
. Alternatively, if the shaddah is not transliterated (since it is strictly not a letter), a strictly literal transliteration would be ''alnūr'', which presents similar problems for the uninformed non-Arabic speaker. * A transliteration should render the "closed tāʼ" (''
tāʼ marbūṭah Taw, tav, or taf is the twenty-second and last letter of the Semitic abjads, including Arabic ''tāʾ'' , Aramaic ''taw'' 𐡕‎, Hebrew ''tav'' , Phoenician ''tāw'' 𐤕, and Syriac ''taw'' ܬ. In Arabic, it also gives rise to the derived ...
'', ) faithfully. Many transcriptions render the sound as ''a'' or ''ah'' and ''t'' when it denotes . **
ISO 233 The international standard ISO 233 establishes a system for romanization of Arabic script. It was supplemented by ISO 233-2 in 1993 which is specific for Arabic language. 1984 edition The table below shows the consonants for the Arabic langua ...
has a unique symbol, ẗ. * "Restricted alif" (', ) should be transliterated with an
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
, ''á'', differentiating it from regular alif , but it is transcribed in many schemes like alif, ''ā'', because it stands for . * Nunation: what is true elsewhere is also true for nunation: transliteration renders what is seen, transcription what is heard, when in the Arabic script, it is written with diacritics, not by letters, or omitted. A transcription may reflect the language as spoken, typically rendering names, for example, by the people of Baghdad ( Baghdad Arabic), or the official standard ( Literary Arabic) as spoken by a
preacher A preacher is a person who delivers sermons or homilies on religious topics to an assembly of people. Less common are preachers who Open-air preaching, preach on the street, or those whose message is not necessarily religious, but who preach com ...
in the
Mosque A mosque ( ), also called a masjid ( ), is a place of worship for Muslims. The term usually refers to a covered building, but can be any place where Salah, Islamic prayers are performed; such as an outdoor courtyard. Originally, mosques were si ...
or a TV newsreader. A transcription is free to add phonological (such as vowels) or morphological (such as word boundaries) information. Transcriptions will also vary depending on the writing conventions of the target language; compare English ''
Omar Khayyam Ghiyāth al-Dīn Abū al-Fatḥ ʿUmar ibn Ibrāhīm Nīshābūrī (18 May 1048 – 4 December 1131) (Persian language, Persian: غیاث الدین ابوالفتح عمر بن ابراهیم خیام نیشابورﻯ), commonly known as Omar ...
'' with German ''Omar Chajjam'', both for , (unvocalized ', vocalized '). A transliteration is ideally fully reversible: a machine should be able to transliterate it back into Arabic. A transliteration can be considered as flawed for any one of the following reasons: *A "loose" transliteration is ambiguous, rendering several Arabic phonemes with an identical transliteration, or such that digraphs for a single phoneme (such as ''dh gh kh sh th'' rather than ''ḏ ġ ḫ š ṯ'') may be confused with two adjacent consonants—but this problem is resolved in the
ALA-LC ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...
romanization system, where the prime symbol ʹ is used to separate two consonants when they do not form a digraph; for example: ' ('she honored her'), in which the ''t'' and ''h'' are two distinct consonantal sounds, or where the middle dot is used in the same way in the BGN/PCGN romanization. *Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar (e.g., ʻ and ' or ʿ and ʾ for ʻayn and hamzah); *ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type, but may be considered unaesthetic. A fully accurate transcription may not be necessary for native Arabic speakers, as they would be able to pronounce names and sentences correctly anyway, but it can be very useful for those not fully familiar with spoken Arabic and who are familiar with the Roman alphabet. An accurate transliteration serves as a valuable stepping stone for learning, pronouncing correctly, and distinguishing phonemes. It is a useful tool for anyone who is familiar with the sounds of Arabic but not fully conversant in the language. One criticism is that a fully accurate system would require special learning that most do not have to actually pronounce names correctly, and that with a lack of a universal romanization system they will not be pronounced correctly by non-native speakers anyway. The precision will be lost if special characters are not replicated and if a reader is not familiar with Arabic pronunciation.


Examples

Examples in Literary Arabic:


Arabic alphabet and nationalism

There have been many instances of national movements to convert
Arabic script The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic (Arabic alphabet) and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world (after the Latin script), the second-most widel ...
into Latin script or to romanize the language.


Lebanon

A Beirut newspaper, ''La Syrie'', pushed for the change from Arabic script to
Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...
in 1922. The major head of this movement was
Louis Massignon Louis Massignon (25 July 1883 – 31 October 1962) was a French Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding. He was an influential figure in the twentieth century with regard to the Catholic Church's relatio ...
, a French Orientalist, who brought his concern before the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in 1928. Massignon's attempt at romanization failed as the Academy and the population viewed the proposal as an attempt from the Western world to take over their country. Sa'id Afghani, a member of the Academy, asserted that the movement to romanize the script was a Zionist plan to dominate Lebanon.History of Arabic Writing


Egypt

After the period of colonialism in Egypt, Egyptians were looking for a way to reclaim and reemphasize Egyptian culture. As a result, some Egyptians pushed for an Egyptianization of the
Arabic language Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...
in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. There was also the idea of finding a way to use hieroglyphics instead of the Latin alphabet. A scholar, Salama Musa, agreed with the idea of applying a Latin alphabet to Egyptian Arabic, as he believed that would allow Egypt to have a closer relationship with the West. He also believed that Latin script was key to the success of Egypt as it would allow for more advances in
science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
and
technology Technology is the application of Conceptual model, conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word ''technology'' can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible too ...
. This change in script, he believed, would solve the problems inherent with Arabic, such as a lack of written vowels and difficulties writing foreign words.Shrivtiel, p. 188 Ahmad Lutfi As Sayid and Muhammad Azmi, two Egyptian intellectuals, agreed with Musa and supported the push for romanization. The idea that romanization was necessary for modernization and growth in Egypt continued with Abd Al Aziz Fahmi in 1944. He was the chairman for the Writing and Grammar Committee for the Arabic Language Academy of Cairo. He believed and desired to implement romanization in a way that allowed words and spellings to remain somewhat familiar to the Egyptian people. However, this effort failed as the Egyptian people felt a strong cultural tie to the Arabic alphabet, particularly the older generation.


See also

*
Arabic chat alphabet The Arabic chat alphabet, also known as ''Arabizi'', ''Arabeezi'', ''Arabish'', Franco-Arabic or simply Franco (from ) refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combinati ...
*
Arabic diacritics The Arabic script has numerous diacritics, which include consonant pointing known as (, ), and supplementary diacritics known as (, ). The latter include the vowel marks termed (, ; , ', ). The Arabic script is a modified abjad, where all ...
*
Arabic grammar Arabic grammar () is the grammar of the Arabic language. Arabic is a Semitic languages, Semitic language and its grammar has many similarities with the Semitic languages#Grammar, grammar of other Semitic languages. Classical Arabic and Modern St ...
*
Arabic names Arabic names have historically been based on a long naming system. Many people from Arabic-speaking and also non-Arab Muslim countries have not had given name, given, middle name, middle, and family names but rather a chain of names. This system ...
*
Glottal stop (letter) ʔ (majuscule: Ɂ, minuscule: ɂ), called glottal stop, is an alphabetic letter in some Latin alphabets, most notably in several languages of Canada where it indicates a glottal stop sound. Such usage derives from phonetic transcription, f ...
*
Maltese alphabet The Maltese alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet with the addition of some letters with diacritic marks and Digraph (orthography), digraphs. It is used to write the Maltese language, which evolved from the otherwise extinct Siculo-Arabic diale ...
*
Ottoman Turkish alphabet The Ottoman Turkish alphabet () is a version of the Perso-Arabic script used to write Ottoman Turkish for over 600 years until 1928, when it was replaced by the Latin-based modern Turkish alphabet. Though Ottoman Turkish was primarily writt ...
– a
Perso-Arabic The Persian alphabet (), also known as the Perso-Arabic script, is the right-to-left script, right-to-left alphabet used for the Persian language. It is a variation of the Arabic script with four additional letters: (the sounds 'g', 'zh', ' ...
-based alphabet, which was replaced by the Latin-based
Turkish alphabet The Turkish alphabet () is a Latin-script alphabet used for writing the Turkish language, consisting of 29 letters, seven of which ( Ç, Ğ, I, İ, Ö, Ş and Ü) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements o ...
in 1928 * Romanization of Hebrew *
Romanization of Persian Romanization or Latinization of Persian (, ) is the representation of the Persian language (Iranian Persian, Dari language, Dari and Tajik language, Tajik) with the Latin script. Several different romanization schemes exist, each with its own set ...
* Standard Arabic Technical Transliteration System (SATTS)


References


External links


Comparative table of DIN 31635, ISO 233, ISO/R 233, UN, ALA-LC, and Encyclopædia of Islam
(PDF; not normative) {{DEFAULTSORT:Romanization Of Arabic Arabic orthography