Franco Arabic: why Egyptians write 3, 7 and 2 in text messages
The digits aren't slang. They're the letters English doesn't have.
If you have ever been added to a group chat with Egyptians, you have seen messages like ana 7abetha awi or 3amel eh, and wondered what the numbers are doing there. They are letters. Arabic has six or seven sounds with no Latin equivalent, and rather than invent diacritics that nobody can type, people reached for the digits that look like the Arabic letters.
It goes by several names — franco, franco-arab, Arabizi, Arabish, or just "Arabic chat" — and it is entirely unofficial. Nobody standardised it. It spread because it worked.
The substitutions
The glottal stop. Also stands in for ق in Egyptian, where the q is pronounced as a glottal stop anyway.
أهوة → 2ahwa (coffee)
A mirror image of ع, which is where the choice comes from. No English sound is close.
عربي → 3arabi (Arabic)
From خمسة (khamsa, "five"). Competes with "kh", which is more common in Egypt.
خلاص → 5alas or khalas (enough)
The emphatic t. Rarer than the others; many people just write t.
طويل → 6aweel or taweel (tall)
The breathy throat h, as opposed to ه. The digit resembles the letter.
حبيبي → 7abibi (my dear)
The gargled r. Usually written "gh" instead, which most people find easier to read.
غالي → 8aly or ghaly (expensive)
The emphatic s. Like 6, frequently skipped in favour of plain s.
صعب → 9a3b or sa3b (difficult)
Everything else maps onto Latin letters the way you would guess. The pattern behind the digits is visual rather than phonetic: 3 is a mirrored ع, 7 has the shape of ح, 2 resembles the hamza. Where the shape does not help, people fall back on the first letter of the Arabic numeral itself — 5 for خ comes from خمسة.
Where it came from
Early mobile phones and the early web could not handle Arabic script. SMS in the late nineties either had no Arabic support or charged you roughly double per message for it, because Arabic characters ate more of the message limit. Chat clients mangled the encoding. Writing Arabic in Latin letters was the only option, and the digits were the workaround for the sounds that ran out of letters.
That constraint is long gone. Every phone sold today has an Arabic keyboard a long-press away. Franco did not go away with it, which is the more interesting half of the story.
Why it survived
Switching keyboards mid-sentence is genuinely annoying, and a lot of conversation is bilingual — a sentence of Arabic with an English word in the middle of it. Typing the whole thing in Latin letters is faster than toggling twice.
It also solves a problem that the Arabic script has and Latin does not: the script does not write short vowels. كتب could be katab ("he wrote"), kutub ("books"), or kutiba ("it was written"). Franco spells the vowels out. For dialect in particular, where the vowels are exactly what differs between Cairo and Beirut, that is a real advantage. Written Egyptian in Arabic script is inherently a little ambiguous about pronunciation. Franco is not.
And there is a register to it. Franco reads as casual and young. Nobody sends a work email in it. It belongs to the same category as lowercase and no punctuation in English — a signal about the relationship, not just a way of encoding words.
The inconsistency is real
Because nothing was ever standardised, the same word has several accepted spellings and everyone reads all of them without effort.
- خلاص is khalas, 5alas, or 7'alas.
- شكرا is shokran or shukran.
- إزيك is ezayak, izzayak, or ezzayk.
Regional habits differ too. Egyptians lean on kh and gh where Gulf writers are more likely to use 5 and 8. The emphatic letters (6 for ط, 9 for ص) get dropped by plenty of people who just write t and s and let context handle it.
Should you learn it?
Learn to read it, because you will be sent it. It takes about five minutes; the table above is most of what there is.
Do not use it as your way into the language. Franco cannot teach you the script, and the script is not optional — every book, sign, subtitle and news article is in it, and the two weeks it takes to learn is the best trade available in Arabic. Read franco when a friend writes it. Write Arabic in Arabic.
The one genuine exception is a search box. If you do not have an Arabic keyboard set up yet, franco is how you look a word up, which is why every word on this site carries its franco spelling next to the Arabic.
Next
- Writing Arabic in English — building a keyboard that maps English keys to Arabic sounds, and the problems that came with it.
- The virtual Arabic keyboard — type Arabic without installing a layout.
- Egyptian Arabic vocabulary — every word with its Arabic spelling, its pronunciation and its franco form.