Hard and Soft G - English

English

In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard ⟨g⟩ is /ɡ/ and that of soft ⟨g⟩ is /dʒ/; in a number of French loanwords, soft ⟨g⟩ is /ʒ/. In word roots of non-Germanic origin, the soft ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs before ⟨i e y⟩ while the hard ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs elsewhere; Digraphs and trigraphs, such as ⟨ng⟩, ⟨gg⟩, and ⟨dge⟩, have their own pronunciation rules.

Notable exceptions include words of Greco-Romance origin, such as algae. (Other notable irregularities include margarine and mortgagor, pronounced with a soft ⟨g⟩; gaol and gaoler, alternative spellings of jail and jailer; as well as a few American English spellings such as judgment and abridgment, pronounced the same as the more-common-in-British English spellings judgement and abridgement.)

While ⟨c⟩, which also has hard and soft pronunciations, exists alongside ⟨k⟩ (which always indicates a hard pronunciation), ⟨g⟩ has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard ⟨g⟩ sound, even though English uses ⟨j⟩ consistently for the soft ⟨g⟩ sound. This leads to special issues regarding the "neatness" of orthography when suffixes are added to words that end in a hard-⟨g⟩ sound.