Romanization of Arabic

Representation of Arabic in Latin script

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).

Romanization is often termed "transliteration", but this is not technically correct. 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 of the مناظرة الحروف العربية is a transcription, indicating the pronunciation; an example transliteration would be .

DMG (Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, 1935), adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. 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). Spanish romanization, identical to DMG/DIN with the exception of three letters: ǧ > ŷ, ḫ > j, ġ > g.
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. BS 4280 (1968), developed by the British Standards Institution.

Most uses of romanization call for transcription rather than transliteration: 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. 2=ا vs. ى for the sound , and the six different ways (ء إ أ آ ؤ ئ) of writing the glottal stop (hamza, 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 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 (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, ة) faithfully. Many transcriptions render the sound as a or ah and t when it denotes ISO 233 has a unique symbol, ẗ. "Restricted alif" (, ى) 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 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 in the mosque 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 with German Omar Chajjam, both for عمر خيام , (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 romanization system, where the prime symbol ʹ is used to separate two consonants when they do not form a digraph; for example: أَكْرَمَتْها ('she honored her'), in which the t and h are two distinct consonantal sounds. Symbols representing phonemes may be considered too similar (e. g., ʻ and ' or ʿ and ʾ for ع 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.

There have been many instances of national movements to convert Arabic script into Latin script or to romanize the language.

A Beirut newspaper, La Syrie, pushed for the change from Arabic script to Latin script in 1922. The major head of this movement was Louis Massignon, 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.

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 in which the formal Arabic and the colloquial Arabic would be combined into one language and the Latin alphabet would be used. 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.