Ĝ

Template:Infobox grapheme Template:Esperanto sidebar Ĝ or ĝ (G circumflex) is a consonant in Esperanto orthography, representing a voiced postalveolar affricate (either palato-alveolar or retroflex), and is equivalent to a voiced postalveolar affricate or a voiced retroflex affricate or a voiced circumflex type pharynvelar consonant.

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 (with some exceptions in English), to better preserve the shape of borrowings from those languages (such as ĝenerala from general) than Slavic đ (Serbo-Croatian) or dž would.

Uses of Ĝ in other languages

In Haida, a language isolate, the letter ĝ was sometimes used to represent pharyngeal voiced fricative Template:IPAslink.

In Aleut, an Eskaleut language, ĝ represents a voiced uvular fricative Template:IPAslink. The corresponding voiceless Aleut sound is represented by x̂.

In Dutch, the letter ĝ is used in some phrase books and dictionaries for pronunciation help. It represents a plosive Template:IPAblink, because g is pronounced as a fricative Template:IPAslink in Dutch.

In some transcriptions of Sumerian, ĝ is used to represent the velar nasal Template:IPAslink.

See also

• Ĉ
• Ĥ
• Ĵ
• Ŝ
• Ŭ