akhi
my brotherThe word, broken down.
أَخي reads right to left. Below, each letter in reading order, with its sound and the keys that type it.
A glottal stop carried on an alif.
A short 'a', written as a small stroke above the letter.
The throaty 'kh', like the 'ch' in Bach or the Scottish 'loch'.
A 'y', or a long 'i' vowel when it carries no vowel of its own.
What does akhi mean in Arabizi?
akhi is how you write أَخي in Arabizi, the Arabic chat alphabet. It means “my brother”. No numbers in this one; it spells out in plain Latin letters.
New to the chat alphabet? See how every letter and number maps: the Arabizi → Arabic guide. Got it the other way round, with Arabic script to convert? That is the Arabic to Arabizi converter.
The keystrokes, in order.
On a standard Arabic 101 / Arabic-PC layout — 4 key presses. Diacritics sit on the Shift keys. The on-screen keyboard on this site highlights each key as you go.
It sits in the family lesson of our Arabic typing practice course, if you would rather drill it next to the words it turns up with.
Practice typing this word →- 01Shift+H→أ
- 02Shift+Q→ـَfatḥa
- 03O→خ
- 04D→ي
Getting the sounds right.
Two syllables, A-khee, with the weight on the first. The kh is the sound at the end of "Bach" or the Scottish "loch": air scraping at the back of the mouth, with no k in it. The last vowel is a long ee, because the word ends in ي.
Example sentences.
Sentences using أَخي, with diacritics so the rhythm is unambiguous.
My brother, your brother, his.
The ending says whose brother it is. Here's akhi next to the rest:
Between friends akhi works like “bro” and says nothing about family. You'll hear ya akhi a lot, the ya being how Arabic calls to someone. Dialects bend the word: akhuy in the Levant, akhuya in Egypt. And akh grows a long u before every ending except “my”, which is why “your brother” comes out akhuka.
This page shows the written standard. In everyday Palestinian speech, “my brother” is 'akhooy (أَخُويْ). Our sister site Tfaddalu teaches the spoken dialect, with audio and example sentences. Hear 'akhooy on Tfaddalu →