Arabic keyboard for Darija

Type Darija the way you text, in Latin letters and digits, and get it in Arabic script. Every word it recognises links to its meaning in English.

How it works

On messaging apps and social media, Darija is mostly written in Latin letters: that is Arabizi. Sounds the Latin alphabet cannot write are replaced by digits whose shape recalls the Arabic letter. The keyboard goes the other way: it recognises each word you type and offers its Arabic spelling, as found in Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian texts.

It does not simply convert letter by letter. The same word gets written ten ways, “bezzaf”, “bzaf” or “bezaf”, and Arabizi almost never writes short vowels. So the keyboard compares the consonant skeleton of what you type with a vocabulary of nearly thirty thousand words collected from real texts, and ranks the candidates by likeness and frequency. When it is unsure, it shows the alternatives under the input box: click one to correct the word.

The digits of Arabizi

• 2: hamza (ء), a glottal stop.
• 3: ayn (ع), a voiced sound from deep in the throat with no English equivalent.
• 5: kha (خ), like the ch in Scottish loch.
• 6: emphatic ta (ط).
• 7: ha (ح), a breathy h from the throat.
• 8: light ha (ه) or ghayn (غ), depending on the writer.
• 9: qaf (ق), a k pronounced at the back of the throat.

Usage varies from one writer to the next. In the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian texts the keyboard was built from, 3, 9 and 7 are by far the most common, 8 is rare and 6 hardly ever appears.

The dictionary

Every recognised word that has an entry in the dictionary is shown under the keyboard with its meaning in English. The English dictionary has 2,876 words of Moroccan Darija, 1,900 words of Algerian Darja and 3,514 words of Tunisian Derja.