History
It started 1995-1996 on the IRC, from #Kuwait on EFnet. After facing a problem in delivering the right pronunciations for some of the Arabic letters in English, while communication in IRC at 90's was somehow impossible.
During the last few decades and especially since the 1990s, Western-invented text communication technologies have become increasingly prevalent in the Arab world; for example, personal computers, the World Wide Web, email, bulletin board systems, IRC, instant messaging and mobile phone text messaging. Originally, most of these technologies provided users with only the ISO basic Latin alphabet (ASCII). (Some still lack the Arabic script.) When communicating via these technologies, therefore, Arabic-speakers used the available Latin characters to compose messages in a transliterated form of Arabic. To handle those Arabic letters that have no phonetic approximate in the Latin alphabet, other characters, including numerals and punctuation and would be appropriated, especially when there were some visual resemblance. For example, the numeral "3" is used to represent the Arabic letter "ع" ("Ayn").
There is no universal name for this type of transliteration, as it is relatively young and is only used in an informal setting. Some people have named it Arabic/English because it was most often used to communicate on online chat services; the main name is "Aralish" or "Arabish" (a portmanteau of "Arabic" and "English"). "Arabish" is like "Spanglish" which is a combination of Spanish and English, and is commonly spoken by younger generation, speakers of both languages.
Though Arabish was once a necessity for sending SMS's in Arabic, phone service providers now widely offer Arabic alphabet support. Despite this, use of Arabish continues, in part due to its popularity, and in part due to its usefulness in transliterating Arabic to English.
Some Pan-Arabists, view Arabish as a detrimental form of Westernization. Arabish emerged amid a growing trend among Arab youth, especially in Lebanon and Jordan, to incorporate English into Arabic as a form of slang. Arabish is used to replace Arabic script, and this raises concerns regarding the preservation of the quality of the language. See Arabic and Islam.
Read more about this topic: Arabish
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