Arabic chat alphabet

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).

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.

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