Arabic chat alphabet

Updated on Oct 22, 2023

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The Arabic chat alphabet, also known as Arabish, Moaarab (معرب), Arabizi (عربيزي), Araby (عربي), Franco-Arabic, is an alphabet used to communicate in Arabic over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones. It is a character encoding of Arabic to the Latin script and the Arabic numerals.

It differs from more formal and academic Arabic transliteration systems, as it avoids diacritics by freely using digits and multigraphs for letters that do not exist in the basic Latin script (ASCII).

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 into 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), note the usage of the mirroring technique to create a visual similarity between the Arabic letter and its numeral substitution. 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.

Usage

Online communications, such as IRC, bulletin board systems, and blogs, are often run on systems or over protocols which don't support codepages or alternate character sets. This system has gained common use and can be seen even in domain names such as Qal3ah.

It is most commonly used by youth in the Arab world in very informal settings, for example communicating with friends or other youths. The Arabic chat alphabet (ACA) is never used in formal settings and is rarely, if ever, used for long communications. A single communication in ACA rarely exceeds more than a few sentences.

Even though the Arabic language is well integrated with Windows XP and Mac OS X, people still use it in Arabic forums and instant Messaging programs such as Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger because they don't always have Arabic keyboards.

Arabish is used on many public advertisements by large multinationals. Because of its widespread use, large players in the online industry like Google and Microsoft have introduced tools that convert text written in Arabish to Arabic. Add-ons for Mozilla Firefox and Chrome also exist.

Arabic chat alphabet is used to communicate in the Arabic language over the Internet or for sending messages via cellular phones when the Arabic alphabet is unavailable or difficult to use for technical reasons. It is a character encoding of Arabic letters to the English alphabet and Hindu-Arabic numerals.

Comparison table

Because of the informal nature of this system, there is no single "correct" way, so some character usage overlaps.

Most of the characters in the system make use of the roman character (as used in English and French) that best approximates phonetically the Arabic letter that one wants to express (for example, ب corresponds to b). This may sometimes vary due to regional variations in the pronunciation of the Arabic letter (e.g. ﺝ might be transliterated as j in the Levantine dialect, or as g in the Egyptian dialect).

Those letters that do not have a close phonetic approximate in the Latin script are often expressed using numerals or other characters, so that the numeral graphically approximate the Arabic letter that one wants to express (e.g. ع is represented using the numeral 3 because the latter looks like a horizontal reflection of the former).

Since many letters are distinguished from others solely by a dot above or below the main character, the conversions frequently used the same letter or number with an apostrophe added before or after (e.g. '3 is used to represent غ).

North Levantine Arabic

Lebanese, Syrian, Jordanian and Palestinian

Saudi Arabic

This includes Hejazi Arabic and Najdi Arabic.

Maghrebian Arabic

Often used in Moroccan Arabic, Algerian Arabic and Tunisian Arabic

Gulf Arabic

This includes the Gulf Arabic dialect spoken along the Persian Gulf coasts of Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, UAE and Saudi Arabia.

Iraqi Arabic

As with all Arabic dialects, every geographical area has a slightly different dialect.

Sudanese Arabic

This is the form of Colloquial Arabic spoken in Sudan.

Chadian Arabic

This is the form of Colloquial Arabic spoken in N'Djamena, Chad.It is also sometimes called Shuwa Arabic.

Criticism

Conservative Muslims, as well as Pan-Arabists and some Arab-nationalists, 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.