| Description | The United Nations recommended romanization
system was approved in 1972 (resolution II/8),
based on the system adopted by Arabic experts at
the conference held at Beirut in 1971 with the
practical amendments carried out and agreed upon
by the representatives of the Arabic-speaking
countries at their conference. The table was
published in volume II of the conference report1
. In the UN resolution it was specifically
pointed out that the system was recommended "for
the romanization of the geographical names within
those Arabic-speaking countries where this system
is officially acknowledged". It cannot be
definitely ascertained which of the
Arabicspeaking countries have adopted this system
officially, especially since 2007 when there are
efforts by the Arabic Division to promote a
modification of the UN system (ADEGN
romanization, see the section on other
romanization systems below), with varying
success2 . Judging by the use of names in
international cartographic products which rely
mostly on national sources it appears that the UN
system or its modification is more or less
current in Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Saudi Arabia3 ,
United Arab Emirates and Yemen, there and in some
other countries the system is often used without
diacritical marks. For the geographical names of
the Syrian Arab Republic international maps
favour the UN system while the local usage seems
to prefer a French-oriented romanization. Also in
Egypt and Sudan there exist local romanization
schemes or practices side by side with the UN
system. The geographical names of Algeria,
Djibouti, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia are
generally rendered in the traditional manner
which conforms to the principles of the French
orthography. Resolution 7 of the Seventh UN
Conference on the Standardization of Geographical
Names (1998) recommended that "the League of Arab
States should, through its specialized
structures, continue its efforts to organize a
conference with a view to considering the
difficulties encountered in applying the amended
Beirut system of 1972 for the romanization of
Arabic script, and submit, as soon as possible, a
solution to the United Nations Group of Experts
on Geographical Names". At the Eighth UN
Conference on the Standardization of Geographical
Names (2002), the Arabic Division of the UN Group
of Experts announced that it had finalised
proposed modifications to the UN recommended
romanization system. These proposals would be
submitted to the League of Arab States for
approval. Arabic is written from right to left.
The Arabic script usually omits vowel points and
diacritical marks from writing which makes it
difficult to obtain uniform results in the
romanization of Arabic. It is essential to
identify correctly the words which appear in any
particular name and to know the standard Arabic-
script spelling including proper pointing. One
must also take into account dialectal and
idiosyncratic deviations. The romanization is
generally reversible though there are some
ambiguous letter sequences (dh, kh, sh, th) which
may also point to combinations of Arabic
characters in addition to the respective single
characters.
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