Ğ

Template:Short description Template:Infobox grapheme Ğ (g with breve; minuscule: ğ) is a Latin letter found in the Turkish and Azerbaijani alphabets as well as the Latin alphabets of Zazaki, Laz, Crimean Tatar, Tatar, and Kazakh. It traditionally represented the voiced velar fricative or the voiced uvular fricative . However, in Turkish, the phoneme has in most cases been reduced to a silent letter, serving as a vowel-lengthener. But for Crimean Tatar spelling in Romania it represents the voiced palato-alveolar affricate .

Turkish use

Current use

In Turkish, the Template:Angbr is known as (; 'soft g') and is the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet. It always follows a vowel, and can be compared to the ('soft g') in Danish.

Similarly to Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar and other Turkic languages, Turkish used to have a /ɣ/ phoneme which could occur in all positions. However, the phoneme was gradually lost as it fortified to a /g/ if not preceded by a vowel and eroded away elsewhere. The fortified form is now written with a ⟨g⟩, while the eroded form is shown with a ⟨ğ⟩; showing that in native Turkish words which have vowels in contact with each other, there used to be a consonant separating them (in fact Turkish language resources will still insist native words do not have consecutive vowels). In loanwords, consecutive vowels are not separated with a ğ, but in speech they may be separated by a glottal stop, e.g. or , which may be pronounced as either or .)

The realization of the phoneme depends on its location in a word and the surrounding vowels:

ağ
eğ
iğ
ığ
oğ
uğ
öğ
üğ
ağa
ığı
uğu
eğe
iği
üğü
ağu
oğa
oğu
uğa
öğe
öğü
üğe
ağı	*
ığa
eği	*
iğe

• in word-final and syllable-final positions it lengthens the preceding vowel, for example: ('mountain[s]'), ('shallow'); when following a front vowel (e, i), it may sound Template:IPAslink instead: ('cane');
• between identical back vowels (a, ı, u) it is silent: ('shelter'), ('good luck');
• between identical front vowels (e, i, ü) it is either silent: ('that I love'), or pronounced : ('wedding');
• between different rounded vowels (o, u, ö, ü), or between rounded (o, u, ö, ü) and unrounded (a, e) vowels it is mostly silent, but may be a bilabial glide: ('cold'), ('onion');
• ağı may sound as two vowels or as long a: ('heavy');
• ığa is always two vowels: ('which fits');
• in eği and iğe it is either silent or pronounced as if written y: ('not'), ('other'); in colloquial speech eği is long i: ;
• eği and ağı in the future suffix -(y)AcAK- are formally / or colloquially Template:IPAblink/: ('I will love'); ('I will write').

Some webpages may use Template:Angbr (uppercase) and Template:Angbr (lowercase) for Template:Angbr because of improper encoding; see Turkish characters for the reasons of this.

Historical use

The letter, and its counterpart in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, Template:Angbr, were once pronounced as a consonant, , the voiced velar fricative, until very recently in the history of Turkish, but it has undergone a sound change by which the consonant was completely lost and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel occurred, hence its function today. The sound change has not completely eliminated the sound in some Turkish dialects. The previous consonantal nature of the sound is evinced by earlier English loanwords from Turkish, such as yogurt/yoghurt (modern Turkish ) and agha (modern Turkish ), and the corresponding velar fricative found in cognate words in the closely related Azerbaijani language and the Turkish-influenced Crimean Tatar language. In Old Turkic (as well as earlier during Proto-Turkic times), this voiced velar fricative originated as an allophone of , the voiced velar stop, when it occurred intervocalically. The expected process of lenition (weakening and eventual loss of the intervocalic Proto-Turkic consonant *) is thus complete in Turkish and underway in many other Common Turkic languages.

Azerbaijani and Crimean Tatar use

In Azerbaijani and Crimean Tatar, Template:Angbr represents Template:IPAslink, the voiced velar fricative. For Crimean Tatar spelling used in Romania it represents the voiced palato-alveolar affricate . In Azerbaijani, ğ never occurs at the beginning of a word.

Tatar use

The Turkic Tatar language is written mostly in Cyrillic, but a Latin-based alphabet is also in use. In the Latin alphabet, ğ represents Template:IPAslink, the voiced uvular fricative. In Cyrillic, Tatar uses г for both g and ğ without distinction.

Tatar ğ / г is the Arabic ghayn غ. In Arabic words and names where there’s an ayin ع, Tatar adds the ghayn instead (عبد الله, ʻAbd Allāh, ’Abdullah; Tatar: Ğabdulla, Габдулла; Yaña imlâ: غابدوللا /ʁabdulla/).

In the Mishar Tatar Dialect, ğ is not pronounced, and thus, a word like şiğır (شعر, шигыр, "poem") is şigır or şiyır for Mishars (who in Finland use the Latin alphabet).

Kazakh use

The current Kazakh Latin alphabet proposal, last updated in March 2021 and commissioned by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, uses ğ to replace the Kazakh Cyrillic Ғ to represent the IPA . The earlier 2020 proposal listed Ǵ instead, but was replaced after public criticism.

Friulian use

The Faggin–Nazzi alphabet for Friulian language uses the caron, owing to its Slavic influence. However, Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr is often substituted with Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr due to the former's lack of availability in fonts and input systems. This is because Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr is in Latin Extended-A alongside Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr, the other caron bearing letters in the alphabet, whereas Template:Angbr/Template:Angbr is in Latin Extended-B, which is available in fewer fonts and input systems.

See also

• Ǧ (g with caron)
• Ġayn (Arabic)
• Ghayn (Cyrillic)
• Hard sign
• Soft sign