Ĝ

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 IPA|/dʒ/ or a voiced retroflex affricate IPA|/dʐ/.

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 (such as "ĝenerala" from "general") than Slavic "đ" would.

The letter "ĝ" is also used in Aleut, where it represents a voiced uvular fricative. The corresponding voiceless Aleut sound is represented by unicode|x̂.

ee also

* Ĉ
* Ĥ
* Ĵ
* Ŝ
* Ŭ