Buckwalter transliteration

The Buckwalter Arabic transliteration was developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter in the 1990s. It is an ASCII only transliteration scheme, representing Arabic orthography strictly one-to-one, unlike the more common romanization schemes that add morphological information not expressed in Arabic script. Thus, for example, a waw will be transliterated as "w" regardless of whether it is realized as a vowel [u:] or a consonant [w] . Only when the waw is modified by a hamza ( _ar. ؤ) does the transliteration change to "&". The unmodified letters are straightforward to read (except for "*"=dhaal and "E"=ayin, "v"=thaa), but the transliterations of letters with diacritics and the harakat take some time to get used to, for example the nunated i`rab "-un", "-an", "-in" appear as "N, F, K", and the sukun ("no vowel") as "o". Ta marbouta _ar. ة is "p".

:hamza:*lone hamza: ':*hamza on alif: >:*hamza on wa: &:*hamza on ya: }:alif:*madda on alif:
:*alif al-wasla: {:*dagger alif: `:*alif maqsura: Y:harakat:*fatha: a:*damma: u:*kasra: i:*fathatayn: F:*dammatayn: N:*kasratayn K:*shadda: ~:*sukun: o:ta marbouta: p:tatwil: _

External links

* [http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-analysis/arabic/info/buckwalter-about.html Information about the transliteration]
* [http://www.xrce.xerox.com/competencies/content-analysis/arabic/info/translit-chart.html Transliteration on XRCE site]
* [http://www.qamus.org/transliteration.htm Transliteration on Tim Buckwalter's site]