Spelling Arabic Personal Names in English

Abstract

Scholarly journals and other academic institutions which publish on Arabic and/or Islamic issues tend to enforce their house guidelines on transliterating Arabic terms and names. Most guidelines require the use of special characters, macrons, etc., which academics cannot but follow if they want to be published.  The guidelines, however, are not uniform across the board of journals. Despite the mandated adherence to the guidelines, the requirement apparently does not apply to the (English) spelling of the name(s) of the author(s) themselves. Different authors, whose first and/or family/last names are spelled in exactly the same way in Arabic, may spell their names in English in diverse ways. This article looks at how 103 individual Arab authors in sixteen English medium journals spell their own names. The survey covered the past four years/volumes. Using linguistic principles from phonology, morphology, word boundary, and Arabic orthography (in contrast to English orthography), this researcher proposes an account for the obvious diversity in name spelling by Arab writers.

Keywords : names, orthography, Romanization, transcription, transliteration