Arabic Chat Alphabet - History

History

During the last decades of the 20th century and especially since the 1990s, Western text communication technologies became increasingly prevalent in the Arab world, such as personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Most of these technologies originally had the ability to communicate using Latin script only, and some of them still do not have the Arabic alphabet as an optional feature. As a result, Arabic speaking users communicated in these technologies by transliterating the Arabic text in to English using Latin script. 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 ). Many users of mobile phones and computers use Arabish even when their system supports the Arabic script because they do not always have Arabic keyboards, or because they are more familiar with the QWERTY keyboard layout for typing.

Some people refer to Arabish as Arabic Chat Alphabet because it was most often used to communicate on online chat services; the main name is "Aralish" or "Arabish" (as "Ara"/"Arab" stands for the first letters of "Arabic" and "Lish"/"ish" stands for the last letters of "English"). In Literary Arabic, the term عربية الدردشة can be constructed, which literally mean "Arabic of chat."

Egyptian internet users more likely call it Franco-Arab. Another possible known name is Arabi bel Engelizi (Egyptian Arabic: عربى بالانجليزى, "Arabic by English"). Arabish and Arabizi are not known namings to Egyptians.