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

G with circumflex
Ĝ ĝ
Gx gx, Gh gh
Usage
Writing system	Latin
Type	alphabetic
Language of origin	Esperanto, Aleut language, Khinalug language, Toba Qom language
Sound values	[dʒ] [dʐ] [ɖʐ] [g] [ŋ] [ʁ] [gː]
In Unicode	U+011C, U+011D
History
Development	(speculated origin) Γ γ 𐌂 C c G g Ĝ ĝ
Transliterations	Г̑ г̑, Ӷ ӷ, Гг гг
Variations	Gx gx, Gh gh
Other
Writing direction	Left to right

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.

Ĝ is the ninth letter in Esperanto orthography. Although it is written as gx and gh respectively in the x-system and h-system workarounds, it is normally written as G with a circumflex: ĝ.

Uses of Ĝ in other languages

In Haida, a language isolate, the letter ĝ was sometimes used to represent pharyngeal voiced fricative /ʕ/.

In Aleut, an Eskaleut language, ĝ represents a voiced uvular fricative /ʁ/. 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 [ɡ], because g is pronounced as a fricative /ɣ/ in Dutch.

In some transcriptions of Sumerian, ĝ is used to represent the velar nasal /ŋ/.

Character mappings

Character information

Preview	Ĝ		ĝ
Unicode name	LATIN CAPITAL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX		LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH CIRCUMFLEX
Encodings	decimal	hex	dec	hex
Unicode	284	U+011C	285	U+011D
UTF-8	196 156	C4 9C	196 157	C4 9D
Numeric character reference	Ĝ	Ĝ	ĝ	ĝ
Named character reference	Ĝ		ĝ

See also

• Ĉ
• Ĥ
• Ĵ
• Ŝ
• Ŭ