The romanization of Arabic is the systematic rendering of written and spoken Arabic in the Latin script. Romanized Arabic is used for various purposes, among them transcription of names and titles, cataloging Arabic language works, language education 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 and non-standard Latin characters and are used in academic settings or for the benefit of non-speakers, contrast with informal means of written communication used by speakers such as the Latin-based Arabic chat alphabet.

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 phonemes that do not exist in English or other European languages; the means of representing the Arabic definite article, 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/Moslem or Mohammed/Muhammad/Mohamed).

Method

Romanization is often termed "transliteration", but this is not technically correct.^[1] Transliteration 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 above rendering munāẓaratu l-ḥurūfi l-ʻarabīyah of the Arabic: مناظرة الحروف العربية is a transcription, indicating the pronunciation; an example transliteration would be mnaẓrḧ alḥrwf alʻrbyḧ.

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.^[3]
• Valentin Schindler, Lexicon Pentaglotton: Hebraicum, Chaldicum, Syriacum, Talmudico-Rabbinicum, et Arabicum, 1612. Arabic lemmas were printed in Hebrew characters.^[3]
• Franciscus Raphelengius, Lexicon Arabicum, Leiden 1613. The first printed dictionary of the Arabic language in Arabic characters.^[3]
• Jacobus Golius, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, Leiden 1653. The dominant Arabic dictionary in Europe for almost two centuries.^[3]
• Georg Freytag, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum, praesertim ex Djeuharii Firuzubadiique et aliorum libris confectum I–IV, Halle 1830–1837^[3]
• Edward William Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon, 8 vols, London-Edinburgh 1863–1893. Highly influential, but incomplete (stops at Kaf)^[3]

Mixed digraphic and diacritical

• BGN/PCGN romanization (1956).^[4]
• UNGEGN (1972). United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, or "Variant A of the Amended Beirut System". Adopted from BGN/PCGN.^[5][6]
  • IGN 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.^[5][7]
  • ADEGN 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.^[5]
• ALA-LC (first published 1991), from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress.^[8] This romanization is close to the romanization of the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft and Hans Wehr, which is used internationally in scientific publications by Arabists.
  • IJMES, used by International Journal of Middle East Studies, very similar to ALA-LC.^[9]
  • EI, Encyclopaedia of Islam (1st ed., 1913–1938; 2nd ed., 1960–2005).^[10]

Fully diacritical

• DMG (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1935), adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome.^[11]
  • DIN 31635 (1982), developed by the German Institute for Standardization (Deutsches Institut für Normung).
  • Hans Wehr transliteration (1961, 1994), a modification to DIN 31635.
  • EALL, Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics (edited by Kees Versteegh, Brill, 2006–2009).^[12]
  • Spanish romanization, identical to DMG/DIN with the exception of three letters: ǧ > ŷ, ḫ > j, ġ > g.^[13]
• ISO 233 (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.^{[verification needed]}
• BS 4280 (1968), developed by the British Standards Institution.^[14]

ASCII-based

• ArabTeX (since 1992) has been modelled closely after the transliteration standards ISO/R 233 and DIN 31635.^[15]
• Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s), developed at ALPNET by Tim Buckwalter; does not require diacritics.^[16][17]
• Arabic chat alphabet:^[12] an ad hoc solution for conveniently entering Arabic using a Latin keyboard.

Comparison table