Ĝ


Ĝ or ĝ is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar affricate, and is equivalent to a voiced postalveolar affricate or a voiced retroflex affricate.
While Esperanto orthography uses a diacritic for its four postalveolar consonants, as do the Latin-based Slavic alphabets, the base letters are Romano-Germanic. Ĝ is based on the letter g, which has this sound in English and Italian before the vowels i and e, to better preserve the shape of borrowings from those languages than Slavic đ would.

Uses of ''Ĝ'' in other languages

In Haida, a language isolate, the letter ĝ was sometimes used to represent pharyngeal voiced fricative
In Aleut, an Eskimo-Aleut language, ĝ represents a voiced uvular fricative. The corresponding voiceless Aleut sound is represented by .
In Dutch, the letter ĝ is used in some phrase books and dictionaries for pronunciation help. It represents a plosive, because g is pronounced as a fricative in Dutch.
In some transcriptions of Sumerian, ĝ is used to represent the velar nasal.

Character mappings