Romanized Arabic Across Dialects: Views, Usage Patterns, and Linguistic Variation
2026-08-03 • Computation and Language
Computation and Language
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how Arabic speakers write Arabic using Latin letters, known as Arabizi. They collected information from people who speak different Arabic dialects like Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, and Tunisian to understand how they write and perceive Arabizi. They created two new resources: one that matches Arabic words to their Arabizi forms to see patterns within and between dialects, and another that pairs sentences in Arabic script with their Arabizi versions. Their work is the biggest human-focused study on how Arabizi is used and viewed across different Arabic dialects.
ArabiziArabic scriptdialectstransliterationNLPcross-dialectal variationcorpuscharacter-level alignmentstylistic variation
Authors
Amr Keleg, Ahmed Amine Ben Abdallah, Taha Yassine, Chadi Helwe, Imane Guellil, Nedjma Ousidhoum
Abstract
Arabizi refers to Arabic written in Latin script. Although previous studies have shown that the prevalence and usage of Arabizi vary by factors such as region and age group, most NLP research on Arabic texts treats it as a temporary phenomenon resulting from limited technological support for the Arabic script. In this work, we engage with Arabic speakers to collect insights on their perceptions and usage of Arabizi. We further examine writing norms among speakers of different dialects, focusing on Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Moroccan, and Tunisian Arabic. To this end, we release two resources. First, a character-level alignment of Arabic words to study inter- and intra-dialectal variation across these five dialects, based on words transliterated by survey participants, finding systematic intra-dialectal regularity and inter-dialectal variation. Second, to study Arabic speakers' ability to identify this stylistic variation at the sentence-level, we build a manually curated parallel corpus of sentences written in Arabic script alongside multiple Arabizi transliterations, collected from speakers of the same five dialects. Our study presents the largest human-centered, cross-dialectal study of Arabizi's perceptions and practices to date.