J - Use in Other Languages

Use in Other Languages

The great majority of Germanic languages; such as German, Dutch, Icelandic, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian; use J for the palatal approximant /j/, which is the letter "y" in English. Notable exceptions are English, Scots and Luxembourgish. J also represents /j/ in Albanian, and those Uralic, Baltic and Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet, such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Latvian and Lithuanian. Some related languages, such as Serbian and Macedonian, also adopted J into the Cyrillic alphabet for the same purpose. Because of this standard, the minuscule letter was chosen to be used in the IPA as the phonetic symbol for the sound.

In the Romance languages J has generally developed from its original palatal approximant value in Latin to some kind of fricative. In French, Portuguese, Catalan, and Romanian it has been fronted to the postalveolar fricative /ʒ/ (like s in English measure). In Spanish, by contrast, it has been both devoiced and backed from an earlier /ʝ/ to a present-day /x ~ h/, with the actual phonetic realization depending on the speaker's dialect.

In modern standard Italian spelling, only Latin words, proper nouns (such as Jesi, Letojanni, Juventus etc.) or those of foreign languages have J. Until the 19th century, J was used instead of I in diphthongs, as a replacement for final -ii, and in vowel groups (as in Savoja); this rule was quite strict for official writing. J is also used to render /j/ in dialect, e.g. Romanesque ajo for standard aglio (–/ʎ/–) (garlic). The Italian novelist Luigi Pirandello used J in vowel groups in his works written in Italian; he also wrote in his native Sicilian language, which still retains the J to represent /dʒ/.

In Basque, the diaphoneme represented by j has a variety of realizations according to the regional dialect: (the last one is typical of the Spanish Basque Country).

The letter J is generally not used in the modern Celtic languages, except in loanwords.

Among non-European languages which have adopted the Latin script, J stands for /ʒ/ in Turkish, Azerbaijani and Tatar. J stands for /dʒ/ in Indonesian, Somali, Malay, Igbo, Shona, Oromo, Turkmen and Zulu. It represents a voiced palatal plosive /ɟ/ in Konkani, Yoruba and Swahili. In Kiowa, J stands for a voiceless alveolar plosive, /t/.

In Chinese Pinyin, J stands for /tɕ/, an unaspirated Q. Thai alphabetic symbol #8 จ จาน cho chan with initial value ch (IPA ) and final value t (IPA ) had been transliterated historically as J or j, and preserved in modern usage in, for example, 19th-century King Jessadabodindra and 20th-century House of Sundarakul na Jolburi; as well as for #10 ช ช้าง cho chang with IPA initial tone variation as in the name of 21st-century statesman Abhisit Vejjajiva. In romanized Pashto, J represents ځ, pronounced .

J is not used frequently in the Native American languages Gwich'in, Hän, Kaska, Tagish, Tlingit, Navajo, and Northern and Southern Tutchone.