Arabic Resources - موارد اللغة العربية

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Romanization of Arabic

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 21:26 Mazuki Izani

Online communication is sometimes restricted to an ASCII environment in which not only the Arabic letters themselves but also Roman characters with diacritics are unavailable.

Even when Arabic letters and Roman characters with diacritics are available, they are often difficult to type. This problem is faced by most speakers of languages that use non-Roman alphabets, or heavily modified ones. An ad hoc solution consists of using Arabic numerals which mirror or resemble the relevant Arabic letters in shape. They appear as follows:

3 represents the Arabic letter ع .

5 or 7' represent the Arabic letter خ .

6 represents the Arabic letter ط .

6' represents the Arabic letter ظ .

7 represents the Arabic letter ح .

8 represents the Arabic letter ق .

9 represents the Arabic letter ص .

9' represents the Arabic letter ض .

2 is sometimes used to represent the أ when it is in the middle of a word

The numerals 2, 3 and 7 are vastly used in Arabic chatting, because they represent Arabic letters that do not sound like any letter of the Basic modern Latin alphabet. The other numerals can be replaced by Roman letters that have a very close pronunciation (for example ض can be represented by d, ص by s, ق by q) or a combination of Roman letters (for example, kh can represent خ).

When numerals are to be avoided, a single quote (') may be used in the place of 2, h in the place of 7 and a single quote (') or double vowels in the place of 3 (for example 3a can become aa).