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 (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 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

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