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 () 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 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

• Information about the transliteration
• Transliteration on XRCE site
• Transliteration on Tim Buckwalter's site

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