Lj (digraph) - Z

Z

⟨zh⟩ represents the voiced postalveolar fricative, like the ⟨s⟩ in pleasure, in Albanian and in Native American orthographies such as Navajo. It is used for the same sound in some English-language dictionaries, as well as to transliterate the sound when represented by Cyrillic ⟨ж⟩ and Persian ⟨ژ⟩ into English; though it is rarely used for this sound in native English words (perhaps the only one being zhoosh). ⟨Zh⟩ as a digraph is rare in European languages using the Latin alphabet; in addition to Albanian it is found in Breton in words that are pronounced with /z/ in some dialects and /h/ in others. In Hanyu Pinyin, ⟨zh⟩ represents the voiceless retroflex affricate /tʂ/. When the Tamil language is transliterated into the Latin script, ⟨zh⟩ represents a retroflex approximant.

⟨zs⟩ is the last (forty-fourth) letter of the Hungarian alphabet. Its name is "zsé" and represents /ʒ/, a voiced postalveolar fricative, similar to J in Jacques and si in vision. A few examples are rózsa "rose" and zsír "fat".

⟨zv⟩ is used in the Shona language to write the whistled sibilant /z͎/. This was written ɀ from 1931 to 1955.

⟨zz⟩ is used in Pinyin for /dz/ in languages such as Yi. It is also used with that value in romanized Kabyle. In medieval Czech, it stood for /s/. In Hadza it is ejective /tsʼ/.