BGNPCGN · 1947

Romanization of Arabic (1956)

Authority

bgnpcgn

Year

1947

Source script

Arabic Arab · 160

Destination script

Latin Latn · 215

Language

Persian

This System was adopted by the BGN in 1946 and by the PCGN in 1956 and is applied in the systematic romanization of geographic names in Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Uniform results in the romanization of Arabic are difficult to obtain, since vowel points and diacritical marks are generally omitted from both manual and machine writing. It follows that for correct identification of the words which appear in any particular name, knowledge of its standard Arabic- script spelling including proper pointing, and recognition of dialectal and idiosyncratic deviations are essential. In order to bring about uniformity in the Roman-script spelling of geographic names in Arabic- language areas, the system is based insofar as possible on fully pointed modern standard Arabic. In the interest of clarity, vowel pointing has been applied to the examples below. Arabic is written from right to left, and does not make a distinction between upper and lower case.

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