Romanization Standards and Systems
This list is sorted chronologically. Bold face indicates column headlines as they appear in the table below.
- IPA: International Phonetic Alphabet (1886)
- Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1936): Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0-87950-003-4).
- BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institution.
- SATTS: One-to-one mapping to Latin Morse equivalents.
- UNGEGN (1972): United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, or Variant A of the Amended Beirut System
- IGN System 1973 or Variant B of the Amended Beirut System, which conforms to French orthography and is preferred to the Variant A in French-speaking countries as in Maghreb and Lebanon
- DIN 31635 (1982): Developed by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization).
- ISO 233 (1984).
- Qalam (1985): A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case.
- ArabTeX (since 1992) its "native" input is 7-bit ASCII: "has been modelled closely after the transliteration standards ISO/R 233 and DIN 31635"
- ISO 233-2 (1993). Simplified transliteration.
- Hans Wehr transliteration (1994): A modification to DIN 31635.
- Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s): Developed at ALPNET by Tim Buckwalter ; doesn't require unusual diacritics.
- Bikdash Transliteration (BATR): A system which is a compromise between Qalam and Buckwalter Transilterations. It represents consonants with one letter and possibly the single quotation mark as a modifier, and uses one or several Latin vowels to represent short and long Arabic vowels. It strives for minimality as well as phonetic expressiveness. It does not distinguish between the different shapes of the hamza since it assumes that a software implementation can resolve the differences through the standard rules of spelling of Arabic .
- ALA-LC (1997).
- SAS: Spanish Arabists School (José Antonio Conde and others, early 19th century onwards).
- US Intelligence Community (2003). Created specifically to standardize report writing.
- Arabic chat alphabet: Not a system; listed here merely for completeness. In some situations, such as online communication, users need a way to enter Arabic text only with the keys immediately available on a keyboard. As an ad hoc solution, such letters can be replaced with Arabic numerals of similar appearance.
A (non-normative) table comparing romanizations using DIN 31635, ISO 233, ISO/R 233, UN, ALA-LC and Encyclopaedia of Islam systems is available here: .
Read more about this topic: Romanization Of Arabic
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