Arabic Buckwalter transliteration
Convert Arabic script to Buckwalter transliteration (and back). Buckwalter is a one-to-one, ASCII-safe scheme where every Arabic letter and diacritic has a single Latin character — no accents, no diacritics, losslessly round-tripable.
Arabic
About this scheme
Tim Buckwalter designed this transliteration in the 1990s at the LDC (Linguistic Data Consortium) for corpus linguistics and NLP research. Unlike phonetic romanizations — which depend on dialect and are lossy — Buckwalter preserves every Arabic grapheme in plain ASCII, so Arabic text survives being fed through systems that can't handle Unicode. It's still the de-facto standard in Arabic computational linguistics and appears in academic papers, datasets, and treebanks.