Romanization of Arabic

Method

Romanization standards and systems

Mixed digraphic and diacritical

• BGN/PCGN romanization.
• UNGEGN. United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, or "Variant A of the Amended Beirut System". Adopted from BGN/PCGN.
• * 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.
• * romanization is different from UNGEGN in two ways: ظ is d͟h instead of z̧; the cedilla is replaced by a sub-macron in all the characters with the cedilla.
• ALA-LC, from the American Library Association and the Library of Congress. 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.
• * EI, Encyclopaedia of Islam.

  Fully diacritical

• DMG, adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome.
• * DIN 31635, developed by the German Institute for Standardization.
• * Hans Wehr transliteration, a modification to DIN 31635.
• * EALL, Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics.
• * Spanish romanization, identical to DMG/DIN with the exception of three letters: ǧ > ŷ, ḫ > j, ġ > g.
• ISO 233, letter-to-letter; vowels are transliterated only if they are shown with diacritics, otherwise they are omitted.
• * :fr:ISO 233-2|ISO 233-2, simplified transliteration; vowels are always shown.
• BS 4280, developed by the British Standards Institution.

  ASCII-based

• ArabTeX has been modelled closely after the transliteration standards ISO/R 233 and DIN 31635.
• Buckwalter Transliteration, developed at ALPNET by Tim Buckwalter; does not require unusual diacritics.
• 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 to use for hamzah and ʻayn. Appropriate Unicode points would be modifier letter apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ and modifier letter turned comma ⟨ʻ⟩ or modifier letter reversed comma ⟨ʽ⟩, all of which Unicode defines as letters. Often right and left single quotation marks ⟨’⟩, ⟨‘⟩ are used instead, but Unicode defines those as punctuation marks, and they can cause compatibility issues. The glottal stop in these romanizations isn't written word-initially.
• In Encyclopaedia of Islam digraphs are underlined, that is t͟h, d͟j, k͟h, d͟h, s͟h, g͟h. In BGN/PCGN on the contrary the sequences ـتـهـ, ـكـهـ, ـدهـ, ـسهـ may be romanized with middle dot as t·h, k·h, d·h, s·h respectively; the letter g is not used by itself in BGN/PCGN, so no confusion between gh and g+h is possible.
• In the original German edition of his dictionary Wehr used ǧ, ḫ, ġ for j, ḵ, ḡ respectively. The variant presented in the table is from the English translation of the dictionary.
• BGN/PCGN allows use of underdots instead of cedilla.
• Fāʼ and qāf are traditionally written in Northwestern Africa as ڢ and ڧـ ـڧـ ـٯ, 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-yāʼ is only ى in handwriting and print, for both final and final. ى for the latter pronunciation, is called ألف لينة alif layyinah, 'flexible alif'.
• The sun and moon letters 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".

  Romanization issues

Vowels

Transliteration vs. transcription

• Some transliterations ignore assimilation of the definite article al- before the "sun letters", and may be easily misread by non-Arabic speakers. For instance, "the light" النور 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. Alternatively, if the shaddah is not transliterated, a strictly literal transliteration would be alnūr, which presents similar problems for the uninformed non-Arabic speaker.
• A transliteration should render the "closed tāʼ " faithfully. Many transcriptions render the sound as a or ah and t when it denotes.
• *ISO 233 has a unique symbol, ẗ.
• "Restricted alif" should be transliterated with an acute accent, á, differentiating it from regular alif ا, 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 "loose" transliteration is ambiguous, rendering several Arabic phonemes with an identical transliteration, or such that digraphs for a single phoneme may be confused with two adjacent consonants—but this problem is resolved in the ALA-LC romanization system, where the prime symbol ʹ is used to separate two consonants when they do not form a digraph; for example: أَكْرَمَتْها akramatʹhā, in which the t and h are two distinct consonantal sounds.
• Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar ;
• ASCII transliterations using capital letters to disambiguate phonemes are easy to type, but may be considered unaesthetic.

Examples

Arabic alphabet and nationalism

Lebanon

Egypt