Style Guide of Arabic Names

Guidelines – Surnames

All surnames with the article ‘Al’ must be spelled with a hyphen and no space. eg. Al-Dossary, Al-Mulhim, Al-Said, etc.

Guidelines – First Names

This is not an exhaustive list. Please seek assistance for first names not listed here.

Boys’ Names should comply to the following:

• Khalid

• Yousef

• Ahmad

• Muhammad

• Abdul Rahman, Rahim, Karim, Malik, Latif

• Abdullah

• Said

• Suleiman

Girls’ Names should comply to the following:

• Fatimah

• Zahra

• Hawra

• Nouf

• Salma

Explanation

We are attempting use Standard Transliteration without accents, underscores and under-dots to spell the names of the students by employing English romanization. Please follow these guidelines and encourage your students to do the same. All university database systems use the names in Saudi Arabic so it is important for our record keeping that the names are based on standards. Some controversy surrounds the spelling of common Saudi first and last names. In these cases we are implementing a style guide that negotiates the standards and assists with pronunciation as consistently as possible. Nevertheless, we are also searching for expertise in this area to align with the English spelling of names in Gulf countries. Therefore, this style guide is subject to change.

Until a computer-based conversion system is in use at the university, we must do our own transliteration during the first week of term each year as the new students attend their English classes. An additional source of confusion is caused by the variations in how Saudi adults will spell their names when writing in English. They would understandably prefer to spell their names as they always have throughout their lives. We are in no place to instruct them to change that to conform with our style-guide, therefore you will see inconsistencies on a regular basis. For these reasons, this guide is provided to assist you.

References:

1. http://www.names4muslims.com

2. http://www.thenational.ae/thenationalconversation/comment/transliteration-of-names-from-arabic-is-full-of-challenges

3. Transliterating Arabic: The Nuisances of Conversion betweenRomanization and Transcription Schemes – Academic.edu

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Arabic#Transliteration

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_names

6. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:The_99_names_of_Allah

Pronounce Names

How to Pronounce Arabic Names

Please see this useful site to hear the names and help you to learn to pronounce the names of your students correctly:

http://www.pronouncenames.com/pronounce/arabic