The Arabic chat alphabet, Arabizi, [1] Arabeezi, Arabish or Franco-Arabic [2] (franco-arabe) refer to the romanized alphabets for informal Arabic dialects in which Arabic script is transcribed or encoded into a combination of Latin script and Arabic numerals. These informal chat alphabets were originally used primarily by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings—especially for communicating over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones—though use is not necessarily restricted by age anymore and these chat alphabets have been used in other media such as advertising. [3] [4]
These chat alphabets differ from more formal and academic Arabic transliteration systems, in that they use numerals and multigraphs instead of diacritics for letters such as qāf (ق) or ḍād (ض) that do not exist in the basic Latin script (ASCII), and in that what is being transcribed is an informal dialect and not Standard Arabic. [4] These Arabic chat alphabets also differ from each other, as each is influenced by the particular phonology of the Arabic dialect being transcribed and the orthography of the dominant European language in the area—typically the language of the former colonists, and typically either French or English.
Because of their widespread use, including in public advertisements by large multinational companies, large players in the online industry like Google and Microsoft have introduced tools that convert text written in Arabish to Arabic (Google Translate and Microsoft Translator). Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome also exist (Panlatin [5] and ARABEASY Keyboard [6] ). The Arabic chat alphabet is never used in formal settings and is rarely, if ever, used for long communications. [3]
During the last decades of the 20th century, Western text-based communication technologies, such as mobile phone text messaging, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, and instant messaging became increasingly prevalent in the Arab world. Most of these technologies originally permitted the use of the Latin script only, and some still lack support for displaying Arabic script. As a result, Arabic-speaking users frequently transliterate Arabic text into Latin script when using these technologies to communicate. To handle those Arabic letters that do not have an approximate phonetic equivalent in the Latin script, numerals and other characters were appropriated. For example, the numeral "3" is used to represent the Arabic letter ⟨ ع ⟩ (ʿayn)—note the choice of a visually similar character, with the numeral resembling a mirrored version of the Arabic letter. Many users of mobile phones and computers use Arabish even though their system is capable of displaying Arabic script. This may be due to a lack of an appropriate keyboard layout for Arabic, or because users are already more familiar with the QWERTY or AZERTY keyboard layout.
Online communication systems, such as IRC, bulletin board systems, and blogs, are often run on systems or over protocols that do not support code pages or alternate character sets. Thus, the Arabic chat alphabet has become commonplace. It can be seen even in domain names, like Qal3ah.
According to one 2020 paper based on a survey done in and around Nazareth, there is now "a high degree of normativization or standardisation in Arabizi orthography." [7]
Because of the informal nature of this system, there is no single "correct" or "official" usage. There may be some overlap in the way various letters are transliterated.
Most of the characters in the system make use of the Latin character (as used in English and French) that best approximates phonetically the Arabic letter that one would otherwise use (for example, ب corresponds to b). Regional variations in the pronunciation of an Arabic letter can also produce some variation in its transliteration (e.g. ﺝ might be transliterated as j by a speaker of the Levantine dialect, or as g by a speaker of the Egyptian dialect). [8]
Those letters that do not have a close phonetic approximation in the Latin script are often expressed using numerals or other characters, so that the numeral graphically approximates the Arabic letter that one would otherwise use (e.g. ع is represented using the numeral 3 because the latter looks like a vertical reflection of the former).
Since many letters are distinguished from others solely by a dot above or below the main portion of the character, the transliterations of these letters frequently use the same letter or number with an apostrophe added before or after (e.g. '3 is used to represent غ ).
| Letters | Arabic chat alphabet [8] [9] [10] [11] | IPA |
|---|---|---|
| أ إ آ ء ئ ؤ | 2 | ʔ |
| ا | a e è [1] | æ(ː) a(ː) ɑ(ː) ɛ(ː) ɐ |
| ب | b p | b p |
| ت | t | t t̪ t͡s |
| ث | s th t [11] | s θ |
| ج | j g dj [1] | ʒ d͡ʒ ɟ ɟ͡ʝ ɡ |
| ح | 7 h [7] | ħ ʜ |
| خ | kh 7' 5 | x χ |
| د | d | d d̪ |
| ذ | z th dh d [11] | z ð |
| ر | r | ɾ r rˤ |
| ز | z | z |
| س | s | s |
| ش | sh ch [1] $ [6] | ʃ |
| ص | s 9 | sˤ sˠ |
| ض | d dh 9' D [8] | dˤ d̪ˤ d̪ˠ |
| ط | t 6 T [8] | tˤ t̪ˤ t̪ˠ |
| ظ | z th dh 6' | zˤ ðˤ ðˠ |
| ع | 3 [13] | ʕ ʢ |
| غ | gh 3' 8 [9] | ɣ ʁ |
| ف | f v | f v |
| ق | 2 g q 8 [10] 9 [10] | ʔ ɡ ɢ q |
| ك | k g ch [12] | k ɡ t͡ʃ |
| ل | l | l ɫ |
| م | m | m |
| ن | n | n |
| ه | h a e ah eh é [1] | h , /ae/ |
| ة | a e eh at et é [1] | /aeatet/ |
| و | w o ou oo u | w o(ː) u(ː) |
| ي ى [2] | y i ee ei ai a é [1] | j i(ː) e(ː) , /a/ |
| Additional letters | Arabic chat alphabet | IPA |
|---|---|---|
| پ | p | p |
| چ [3] | j ch tch g | ʒ t͡ʃ ɡ |
| ڜ [4] | ch tch | t͡ʃ |
| ڤ ڥ [5] | v | v |
| ڨ گ ݣ [5] | g | ɡ |
Each of the different varieties of Arabic chat alphabets is influenced by the particular phonology of the Arabic dialect being transcribed and the orthography of the dominant European language in the area—typically the language of the former colonists. Below are some examples of Arabic chat alphabet varieties.
The frequent use of y and w to represent ى and و demonstrates the influence of English orthography on the romanization of Egyptian Arabic.
Additionally, the letter qāf (ق) is usually pronounced as a glottal stop, like a Hamza (ء) in Metropolitan (Cairene) Egyptian Arabic—unlike Standard Arabic in which it represents a voiceless uvular stop. Therefore, in Egyptian Arabizi, the numeral 2 can represent either a Hamza or a qāf pronounced as a glottal stop.
| Egyptian Arabic | انا رايح الجامعه الساعه 3 العصر | الجو عامل ايه النهارده فى إسكندريه؟ |
|---|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | Ana raye7 el gam3a el sa3a 3 el 3asr. | el gaw 3amel eh 2lnhrda f eskendereya? |
| Sauhin Arabic transcription | Ana rayikh aljameah alsaea 3 aleasr. | Aljaw eamal ayh alnaharda fy 'iskandaraya? |
| IPA | [ænæˈɾɑˑjeħelˈɡæmʕæ(ʔe)sˈsæːʕætæˈlæːtælˈʕɑsˤɾ] | [elˈɡæwweˈʕæːmelˈe(ːhe)nnɑˈhɑɾdɑfeskendeˈɾejjæ] |
| English | I'm going to college at 3 pm. | How is the weather today in Alexandria? |
| Levantine Arabic | كيف صحتك، شو قاعد بتعمل؟ |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | keef so7tak, shu 2a3ed bte3mal? |
| English | How is your health, what are you doing? |
The use of ch to represent ش demonstrates the influence of French orthography on the romanization of Moroccan Arabic or Darija. French became the primary European language in Morocco as a result of French colonialism. [13]
One of the characteristics of Franco-Arabic as it is used to transcribe Darija is the presence of long consonant clusters that are typically unorthodox in other languages. These clusters represents the deletion of short vowels and the syllabification of medial consonants in the phonology of Darija, a feature shared with and derived from Amazigh languages. [14]
| Moroccan Arabic | كيفاش داير فالقراية؟ |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | kifach dayer fle9raya? |
| IPA | [kifæʃdæjərfləqrˤɑja] |
| English | How are you doing with your studies? |
| Gulf Arabic | شلونك؟ شنو قاعد تسوي الحين؟ |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | shlonik? Shnu ga3d tsawe al7een? |
| English | How are you? What are you doing right now? |
| Iraqi Arabic | عليمن يا گلُب تعتب عليمن؟ |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | 3alayman ya galb ti3tib 3alayman? |
| English | Who are you blaming, my heart, who? |
The use of ch to represent ك (kāf) indicates one of the Palestinian Arabic variant pronunciations of the letter in one of its subdialects, in which it is sometimes palatalized to [ t͡ʃ ] (as in English "chip"). [15] [16] Where this palatalization appears in other dialects, the Arabic letter is typically respelled to either تش or چ.
| Palestinian Arabic | بخير الله إيسلمك شحالك إنتي |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | b7'air allah eysallemch .. sh7aalech enty?? |
| English | Fine, God bless you. How about you? [17] |
| Sudanese Arabic | والله مشتاق ليك شديد يا زول كيفك إنتا؟ انا الحمدلله اكنت داير امشى المحل داك جمب النيل، المكان قريب من بيتك. حاستناك فى الكبرى اتفقنا؟. |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | wallahi moshtag lik shadid ya zol kefak inta? ana alhamdolillah konta dayir amshi le al ma7al dak gamb al nil, al makan garib men betak. 7astanak fi al kubri. htafakna |
| English | Oh, God, I missed you a lot, man! How are you? Thank God. So I want to go to that one place near the Nile, the place near your very house! I'll wait for you at the bridge. deal?? |
| Chadian Arabic | بوه ياخي، إنت عفة؟ ولله سمح أنا ماشي لسوبرمارشة ديك بي وسط نجامينا لو تدور تمشي يعني، تعال معاي يلا ياخي. |
|---|---|
| Arabic transcription | Boh yakhi, inta afé? Wallah semeh, ana maché lê supermarché dik bi ousut n'djamena lô tidoura tamshi yani, ta'al maa'ai yalla yakhi. |
| English | Oh, hey, my brother. How are you? Good. I am going to that supermarket in downtown N'Djamena, so if you want to come, hurry and come with me, my brother! |
The phenomenon of writing Arabic with these improvised chat alphabets has drawn sharp rebuke from a number of different segments of Arabic-speaking communities. While educators and members of the intelligentsia mourn the deterioration and degradation of the standard, literary, academic language, [18] conservative Muslims, as well as Pan-Arabists and some Arab nationalists, view the Arabic Chat Alphabet as a detrimental form of Westernization. Arabic chat alphabets emerged amid a growing trend among Arab youth, from Morocco to Iraq, to incorporate former colonial languages—especially English and French—into Arabic through code switching or as a form of slang. These improvised chat alphabets are used to replace Arabic script, and this raises concerns regarding the preservation of the quality of the language. [2]
Arabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The ISO assigns language codes to 32 varieties of Arabic, including its standard form of Literary Arabic, known as Modern Standard Arabic, which is derived from Classical Arabic. This distinction exists primarily among Western linguists; Arabic speakers themselves generally do not distinguish between Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic, but rather refer to both as al-ʿarabiyyatu l-fuṣḥā or simply al-fuṣḥā (اَلْفُصْحَىٰ).
The Arabic alphabet, or Arabic abjad, is the Arabic script as specifically codified for writing the Arabic language. It is written from right-to-left in a cursive style, and includes 28 letters, of which most have contextual letterforms. The Arabic alphabet is considered an abjad, with only consonants required to be written; due to its optional use of diacritics to notate vowels, it is considered an impure abjad.
The Hebrew alphabet, known variously by scholars as the Ktav Ashuri, Jewish script, square script and block script, is traditionally an abjad script used in the writing of the Hebrew language and other Jewish languages, most notably Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian. In modern Hebrew, vowels are increasingly introduced. It is also used informally in Israel to write Levantine Arabic, especially among Druze. It is an offshoot of the Imperial Aramaic alphabet, which flourished during the Achaemenid Empire and which itself derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
Matres lectionis are consonants that are used to indicate a vowel, primarily in the writing of Semitic languages such as Arabic, Hebrew and Syriac. The letters that do this in Hebrew are alephא, heה, vavו and yodי, and in Arabic, the matres lectionis are ʾalifا, wāwو and yāʾي. The 'yod and waw in particular are more often vowels than they are consonants.
Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters in predictable ways, such as Greek ⟨α⟩ → ⟨a⟩, Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ → ⟨d⟩, Greek ⟨χ⟩ → the digraph ⟨ch⟩, Armenian ⟨ն⟩ → ⟨n⟩ or Latin ⟨æ⟩ → ⟨ae⟩.
A caron is a diacritic mark commonly placed over certain letters in the orthography of some languages to indicate a change of the related letter's pronunciation.
Tunisian Arabic, or simply Tunisian, is a variety of Arabic spoken in Tunisia. It is known among its 12 million speakers as Tūnsi, "Tunisian" or Derja to distinguish it from Modern Standard Arabic, the official language of Tunisia. Tunisian Arabic is mostly similar to eastern Algerian Arabic and western Libyan Arabic.
Shin is the twenty-first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician šīn 𐤔, Hebrew šīn ש, Aramaic šīn 𐡔, Syriac šīn ܫ, and Arabic sīn س. Its sound value is a voiceless sibilant, or.
Qoph is the nineteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician qōp 𐤒, Hebrew qūp̄ ק, Aramaic qop 𐡒, Syriac qōp̄ ܩ, and Arabic qāf ق.
Ayin is the sixteenth letter of the Semitic scripts, including Phoenician ʿayin 𐤏, Hebrew ʿayin ע, Aramaic ʿē 𐡏, Syriac ʿē ܥ, and Arabic ʿayn ع.
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.
Ḏāl is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. In Modern Standard Arabic it represents. In name and shape, it is a variant of dāl (د). Its numerical value is 700. The Arabic letter ذ is named ذَالْ ḏāl. It is written in several ways depending in its position in the word:
Ḍād (ﺽ) is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. In name and shape, it is a variant of ṣād. Its numerical value is 800.
Gaf, is the name of different Perso-Arabic letters, all representing. They are all derived from the letter kāf, with additional diacritics, such as dots and lines. There are four forms, each used in different alphabets:
The Arabic script is the writing system used for Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa. It is the second-most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world, the second-most widely used writing system in the world by number of countries using it, and the third-most by number of users.
The Berber Latin alphabet is the version of the Latin alphabet used to write the Berber languages. It was adopted in the 19th century, using varieties of letters.
Romanization or Latinization of Persian is the representation of the Persian language with the Latin script. Several different romanization schemes exist, each with its own set of rules driven by its own set of ideological goals.
Modern Arabic mathematical notation is a mathematical notation based on the Arabic script, used especially at pre-university levels of education. Its form is mostly derived from Western notation, but has some notable features that set it apart from its Western counterpart. The most remarkable of those features is the fact that it is written from right to left following the normal direction of the Arabic script. Other differences include the replacement of the Greek and Latin alphabet letters for symbols with Arabic letters and the use of Arabic names for functions and relations.
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography, which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography, introduced in 1982, corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics.
Berber orthography is the writing system(s) used to transcribe the Berber languages.
