Latin Script
All modern Romance languages make the hard/soft distinction with ⟨g⟩, except a few that have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino or Haitian Creole. The hard ⟨g⟩ is in almost all these languages (with the exception of Galician, which may instead be a voiceless pharyngeal fricative), though the soft ⟨g⟩ pronunciation, which occurs before ⟨i e y⟩, differs amongst them.
- in Italian, Romanian, and Faroese.
- in French and Portuguese
- in Catalan
- in Spanish
- in Swedish, Norwegian (only to a very limited extent), and Icelandic
Similarly, languages use different strategies to indicate a hard pronunciation before front vowels:
- Italian and Romanian writing systems use ⟨gh⟩ (e.g. Italian laghi, Romanian ghid),
- French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese orthographies use a silent ⟨u⟩ (e.g. French guerre, Catalan guerra, Spanish guija, Portuguese guitarra).
A soft pronunciation before non-front vowels is usually indicated by a silent ⟨e⟩ or ⟨i⟩ (e.g. Italian giorno, French mangeons), though Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan use ⟨j⟩ as in jueves.
Icelandic orthography is a bit more complicated by having lenited pronunciations of ⟨g⟩.
Other languages typically have hard ⟨g⟩ pronunciations except possibly in loanwords where it may represent or .
The orthography of Ganda is similar to Italian in having a soft ⟨g⟩ pronunciation before front vowels (namely ⟨i y⟩) and ⟨gy⟩ indicates this soft pronunciation.
Because Esperanto orthography is phonetic, ⟨g⟩ always represents a hard g; a soft g is represented by the accented letter ⟨ĝ⟩
Read more about this topic: Hard And Soft G, Other Languages
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