Lj (digraph) - W

W

wh⟩ is used in English language for /hw/, the continuation of the PIE labiovelar formerly spelled hw. Most English interrogative words begin with this phoneme, hence their name wh-words. However, this digraph has usually come for /h/ when followed by the letter 'o', as in "who" or "whole". /hw/ has merged with /w/ in most varieties of English in the wine–whine merger. In the Māori language, ⟨wh⟩ represents or more commonly, with some regional variations approaching or . In the Taranaki region, for some speakers, this represents a glottalized . In Xhosa, it represents, a murmured variant of found in loan words.

wr⟩ is now used by most English dialects for /r/. It once was not a digraph but represented the predictable sequence /wr/, a value it retains in a few dialects documented in the twentieth century.

wu⟩ is used in Mandarin pinyin to write the vowel /u/ in initial position, as in the name Wuhan. It is sometimes found with this value in Romanized Korean as well, as in hanwu.

ww⟩ is used in Haida (Bringhurst orthography) for glottalized /ˀw/.

wx⟩ is used in Nambikwara for a glottalized /ˀw/.

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