Soft g

Ğ, or ğ, is a letter, known as soft g or g-breve in English, used in Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar languages. The unicode code point is U+011E for the capital letter and U+011F for the small letter.

Turkish use

In Turkish, the ğ is known as yumuşak ge (soft g) and is the ninth letter of the Turkish alphabet. It has no independent pronounciation, but rather indicates a lengthening of the preceding vowel, which normally does not appear in Turkish when the ğ is absent. For example, dağ (mountain) is pronounced something like daa. The effect of the ğ can be compared to the effect of the gh in 'brought'. The ğ must be located behind a vowel and can therefore not be the initial letter of a word. When found after the vowels e, i, ö or ü, the ğ is pronounced as y (consonant). When found between two vowels, it is sometimes pronounced as y as well. The standard romanization of ğ is gh. Sometimes g is used incorrectly. In rare cases, the phonetic ɣ (gamma) or the Greek letter γ is used. Some webpages may also use Ð and ð due to improper encoding; see for the reasons of this.

Azerbaijani and Tatar use

In Azerbaijani and Tatar, ğ is pronounced as gh (IPA: [ɣ]), a voiced velar fricative. The Ğ is used as initial letter in Tatar only. For example, Ğabdulla is the Tatar way of writing the name Arabic name Abdullah. (in Tatar language ayn and ghayn Arabic letters both was pronounced as ğ)

Ğ in names

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